Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (7 page)

“You drive,” Weston whispered to Brooks. “I’ll escort the others. Don’t rev it. No lights. Roll out quiet and dark.”

“What’s going on?” Brooksy asked, a little twitchy but not smiling.

Weston shook his head. “Later. Just go.”

“What about Austin?” He pointed to the dead Border Patrol officer.

“We’ll come back,” Weston whispered.

Brooksy shrugged. He got behind the wheel of the Jeep, closed the door as quietly as possible, then fired up the engine. To Weston, it seemed the loudest thing he’d ever heard. But then it dropped to a purr and he heard Brooksy put it into gear.

“Vaminos. Let’s go,” he said, using the barrel of his M-16 to gesture toward Paradise. He put a finger to his lips and shushed them. “Quietly.”

The Jeep pulled away from the opening in the fence and for a second, Weston was sure one or more of the Mexican men with him would bolt for the border. The girl wasn’t going anywhere, and he didn’t think the older woman would try to run it out. But the men . . .

He glanced back toward the bodies scattered on the desert and saw that slender silhouette again. It crouched by a corpse with its head cocked and in the moonlight he saw the glint of its eyes, watching the Jeep pull away.

His pulse raced and his finger twitched on the trigger. Weston forced himself not to run, instead urging the others on. They were focused on him, and he had to keep them from panicking. They all fell in step alongside the Jeep, which rolled slowly back toward the ghost town. The sound of helicopter rotors came from that direction. The headlights of Jeeps and Humvees had made a circle, like a wagon train preparing for attack. If they could just get back there, they would be safe.

Finally on the move, he snapped the mouth piece of his comm unit into place. “Weston for Squad Leader. Weston for Squad Leader.”

Seconds ticked by and he was about to radio again when he heard a pop on the line. “What the hell are you whispering for, Weston? It’s all over but the paperwork.”

“Maybe not, sir.”

“What happened? You didn’t catch the coyotes?”

“Got ’em, sergeant, but it’s a mess.” He glanced back, saw the thing—the scavenger—framed in the opening in the fence, standing in the very same spot he’d been in just a minute ago, watching them. Fear ran up the back of his neck and prickled his skin. “And there’s . . . there’s something else over here, sarge. We’re not alone.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Weston thought about that a second. He looked back again.

Only that gaping hole across the border remained, and beyond it the scattered dead. The creature had vanished.

It darted out of the night so swiftly that he barely had time to aim the M-16. The creature came from the left, a paintstroke of fluid black across the moonlit landscape, grabbed hold of the Mexican at the front of their little march and tore open his throat and abdomen in a single pass.

The screaming started.

Weston ran past the others, up to the front of the Jeep, and squeezed off a couple of rounds without a chance in Hell of hitting the thing. It blended too well with the desert and the dark.

“What the hell?” Brooksy roared from behind the wheel of the Jeep.

“Weston. Do you read? Are you under fire?” Ortiz barked in the comm in his ear.

“Under attack!” Weston snapped back. “Not under fire. That was me shooting.”

Ortiz asked half a dozen questions in as many seconds, but Weston wasn’t listening anymore. He pulled the comm from his ear and tossed it to the sand. They were three or four hundred yards from the lights and vehicles and weapons of the DEA and Border Patrol. Not far at all.

Not far
, he told himself.

But those Mexicans hadn’t made it very far, back at the border. They’d been picked off one by one, the stragglers, killed quickly. The thing only slowed down to start its banquet when they were all dead and the screaming was over.

Weston swung the barrel of his M-16, searching the darkness all around, knowing the thing could come from anywhere. The Mexicans not inside the Jeep huddled nearby him. Afraid as they were, no way were they making a break for the border now.

“Damn it, Weston, what was that?” Brooksy asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, without sparing the other grunt a glance.

“Fuck this.”

Brooksy gunned it. The Jeep’s engine roared and the tires spit sand as the vehicle leaped forward.

“God damn it, no!” Weston yelled.

Two of the Mexican men started running after the Jeep, shouting. The others hesitated only a second before following. Weston yelled for them to stop, but they were beyond listening. Exhaustion, starvation, and despair had plagued them earlier—people who’d been taken advantage of by nearly everyone they’d encountered—but now fear drove them to madness.

Weston pursued them. The night loomed up on either side of him. He could feel the vulnerability of his unprotected back, but knew that they were all vulnerable. The darkness shifted. Every shadow, every depression in the desert floor, seemed about to coalesce and take shape and rush at him with its claws out.

The illegals were stretched out in a line, scattered in their pursuit of the Jeep. The thing came out of the night and killed the woman, punching a hole in her chest. Weston brought up his weapon and fired at it. Two bullets hit the woman as her corpse fell. The thing flinched and he thought he’d winged it, but it rushed off into the dark again, merging with the night.

The taillights of the Jeep grew smaller.

Weston swore, catching up with the four survivors. The teenaged girl fell to her knees beside the dead woman, and Weston heard her saying “Tia” over and over, and knew she had been the girl’s aunt.

They all clustered around the sobbing girl. Weston heard the Humvees revving. One of them pulled away from Paradise, headlights turning their way.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “They’re coming.”

But his fingers felt frozen on his weapon. Ortiz would be coming to get them, maybe with inter-agency backup, but seconds counted. He swung the M-16 around, jerking at every sound—real or imagined—from the desert. The survivors stayed low, out of his way. Maybe they hoped the thing would come for him next.

One of the men had begun to cry with the girl.

When Weston saw it, at first he didn’t even know what he was looking at. The thing stood forty feet away, entirely motionless. On instinct he raised the M-16 and squeezed the trigger. The thing darted aside, slipping through the darkness, too fast to hit. It stopped, studied him again, cocked its head and gazed with a terrible intelligence. It thrust out that long, thin, snaking tongue and tasted the air with it.

“El Chupacabra,” one of the men whispered.

Engines roared and headlights splashed across them. A pair of Humvees arrived, one on either side of the group, bathing the Chupacabra in yellow light. It bolted instantly, heading for that gap in the border fence.

“Oh no you don’t,” Weston whispered.

Fast as it was, the thing was making a run for the fence in a straight line. He sighted on its back as Humvee doors popped open and DEA agents jumped out. Ortiz’s voice called out, so Weston knew his squad leader was with them.

Once again the creature paused, framed in that opening in the fence.

Weston squeezed the trigger.

An arm came up under the barrel, knocking the gun’s nose up, and the bullets fired into the desert sky.

Enraged, Weston spun on a man wearing a DEA jacket.

“Back off!” he snapped, shoving the man away. When he glanced back toward the fence, the creature had vanished once more, and he knew that the opportunity had passed. “What’s wrong with you? Did you see that thing? Do you have any idea what it just did? What you let get away?”

Ortiz had come up by then. The DEA agent grinned and Weston wanted to break his face with the butt of his M-16. But the Squad Leader glared at him.

“Stand down, Weston.”

Weston glared at the DEA prick. “Tell me you saw that thing.”

“I didn’t see anything.” The grin remained. “And neither did you. We’ve got thousands of miles of border to worry about. If there’s something else that keeps them from trying to get across, then it’s doing us a favor.”

Behind Weston, the teenaged girl still sobbed over the corpse of her dead aunt. She’d wanted a new beginning, but instead she’d found an ending to so much of her life. All he could think about was that if the girl had been torn open by that thing out in the desert, this son of a bitch would have kept grinning.

Doing us a favor.

Weston looked at the grim, cautious expression on Ortiz’s face. The staff sergeant was silently warning him to keep his mouth shut. More than anything, that made him wonder. Was the grinning DEA man just happy the scavenger was out there in the desert, helping him do his job, or had he and his people put the thing there in the first place? And if they had, were there others?

But he did not ask those questions.

“A Border Patrol officer—Austin—one of the coyotes shot him. He’s down by the fence, DOA,” he said.

“A tragedy,” said the grinning man. “Died in the firefight that cost the lives of a number of illegals as they attempted to enter the country carrying cartel cocaine. A hero of the border wars, this Austin. You were lucky to survive yourself.”

Weston slung his M-16 across his back. One last time he glanced at Ortiz.They already had their version of tonight’s op ready to go. If he tried telling it differently, who would listen?

Slowly, Weston nodded.

“Sir, yes sir.”

The Kraken
Michael Kelly

The Kraken, scaly and oozing slime, was on the kitchen counter. It pulsed and moved across the Formica and eased itself onto the bottom of the food-encrusted stainless steel sink.

I stood on wobbly knees, staring down at the bulbous creature. Two round eyes swung up, stared at me with a keen alien intelligence, unblinking, waiting. I thought I recognized those sad eyes. Tentacles reached, feeling along the bottom of the sink. One slimy appendage found a bit of lasagna stuck to the wall of the sink, tugged it off and shoved it into its dark wet mouth.

My stomach roiled. My head spun. My legs buckled. I grabbed the end of the counter and held fast. I felt like a small ship tossed around in a violent sea.

My own fault, really. Can’t handle the booze like I once could. Christ, what a mistake. Kenny’s fault, too, I guess. Hadn’t seen the bastard in years and he calls me up, out of the blue, says he wants to get together, like old time’s sake. The two of us, tearing up the town. Like back in college.

Except we are not in college anymore and I’m not a kid anymore. And holy mother of fuck, I can’t remember the last time I drank that much beer.

But, yeah, Kenny was always able to talk me into almost anything. Like the time we set off a smoke bomb in biology class. Crazy-ass shit, you know. Always preceded by a few hits off the bong or hash pipe. It made Kenny all moon-eyed and mystical. Not the crazy-ass shit; the drugs. Turned him all gooey and sentimental.

Another time we snuck into the observatory, after hours, so Kenny could use the giant telescope, so he could peer up into the night sky. Bastard was always looking up at the stars, expectant. It wasn’t like he was watching for something, no, it was more like he was waiting for something. Him and his gooey eyes.

“There’s something out there,” Kenny said, wistful. “Something else.” And he turned to me, shaking, his voice all syrupy. “There has to be.”

Last time I saw the crazy fucker was when we went down to the marina in the dead of night and broke into the main clubhouse, took out that ring of keys and found that sleek boat, the Cat, and, yeah, took the damn thing out onto the lake, the water all dark and shiny, full of green mystery, and shards of moonlight sparkling of its surface. More crazy-ass shit. Kenny and me surging along the water, throttle thrown open, the spray rising up, soaking us, and us laughing, neither one of us ever having driven a boat before, you know, and it’s funny, really funny, because this is stupid, but we don’t care, because, yeah, we’re high or drunk or both. Pirates. That’s what we are. Fucking pirates. Adventurers on the high seas. And I tell Kenny that, I say, “We’re on the high seas. Get it?”

And Kenny, sweet doe-eyed Kenny, screws his face up, thinking. Thinking real hard. Then he gets it, you know,
high
seas, and cackles like, well, a peg-legged pirate with one good eye and a foul-mouthed parrot. Like any respectable pirate. A hearty chortle. Avast ye matesy!

We take turns at the wheel, shooting along like the madmen we are, turning circles, doubling back, jumping the wakes. Up, then thunk. Man, it’s some funny shit. Really. At least for a little while.

Soon we are so wet and stoned that it’s not fun any more. You know the feeling, right? You’re high, and pretty much anything seems like a good idea. Anything. But that feeling, like all feelings, dissipates, fritters away. So we stop the boat. And now we are floating on the lake, and the boat starts bobbing. And I’m reminded of when I was a kid and the one time my dad took me fishing, before he decided that a wife and kid were too much for one man and bailed on us. Dad got me to cast a line out, and attached to the line is a small red and white ball, called a bob, oddly enough, and I get a bite, and the bob starts, well, bobbing. Up, then down. And the boat, this slick little thing we’ve, um, borrowed, starts sort of going up and down, like that little red and white bob, you know? And my stomach is doing the same, rising, falling, and the bile in the back of my throat is like corrosive acid.

Kenny looks green. He jumps up, wobbles to the edge of the boat and leans over. He gags and a stream of yellow puke shoots from his mouth. He straightens, wipes his mouth, turns and grins at me. Puke-eating grin, all green and yellow and crusty. He’s a sight, yeah.

“How about another hit?” he asks, reaching into his wet pocket and retrieving a small foil pouch. And then this huge tentacle reaches up, all scaly and slimy and smelling of puke. I blink. Yup, there is it, rising up, a huge fucking tentacle, dripping fish guts, and it wraps around Kenny’s waist, yanks him off his feet, and his puke-eating grin vanishes, and his eyes bug out, fish eyes, and then, briefly, he’s smiling, eyes and mouth wide and I’ve never seen him so happy, so animated. Then whoosh, he’s gone, overboard, and all that is left is a small foil package on the boat’s floorboards, you know, and the smell of dead fish guts and vomit.

So, being the friend I am, I stand there and blink. I’m good at that. I blink again. Still no Kenny. Still gone. But I blink, shake my head, because, really, it’s the hash or shrooms or whatever the hell we ingested from that foil pouch. I probably should have asked Kenny what it was. But it didn’t matter. He always got good shit, and it hadn’t killed me yet.

Kenny doesn’t return. He’s gone. Vanished. Poof!

I stagger to the edge of the boat. My stomach clenches. I retch. Nothing comes up. The water below is still, gleaming darkly. No sign of Kenny and no sign of the Kraken.

Kraken? What the fuck is a Kraken, I think. And where the hell did that come from? Then I remember: Me and Kenny used to listen to this Scandinavian death metal, you know. And one of the bands was The Kraken. All the cover art on their CDs had this beast, a big huge mother-fucking Octopus that lives in the deep sea and attacks ships. Pirate ships. Avast mateys!

But there can’t be a Kraken, can’t be a beast. No. It’s the drugs, baby, the hallucinogens. Kenny has fallen over. And he’s probably dead now because I’m here thinking about Norwegian death metal when I should be saving my friend.

So, I jump overboard, into the lake—and it’s a lake for goddamn sakes, not a fucking sea, so there can’t be a Kraken—and it is cold, you know. Cold. And I sober up real fast, and swim about, but I can’t see when I’m under, it’s too dark. And it is so cold I’m beginning to tighten up, my arms and legs like lead, or some sort of heavy metal, or Scandinavian death metal, dig? And I’m chuckling because it’s funny and scary and fucked up. And I guess I’m not all that sober because I’m making self-referential jokes while Kenny is drowning. But I’m sinking too. So I struggle over to the side of the boat and manage to pull my wet, skinny-ass body back onboard.

No sign of Kenny. Nothing. The lake is calm, motionless, a thing at rest.

And that was the last time I saw Kenny. Until last night.

When he called, I didn’t recognize his voice. It was garbled. Bad cell phone connection.

But it was him all right. We chatted about old times, as if nothing had happened, nothing had changed, his voice warbling in and out as if there was some sort of interference on the line. I told him I thought he was dead and he laughed. Laughed like a madman, like a drunken pirate.

See, I didn’t report anything. I was scared, you know. Who wouldn’t be? Fucking crazy-ass shit. Kind of surreal. Almost convinced myself none of it happened. And I guess it didn’t, because here was Kenny on the other end of the line and he sure as hell wasn’t dead. You know?

Yeah, I was a fucking coward. Selfish bastard.

Here’s his story: He fell overboard. Fuck, surprised we both didn’t, truth be told. That was some mighty fine mushrooms we’d consumed. He told me he went under and that he could see things really clearly, like a new world opening up to him, and he swam around for a while, like he was born to water, you know. After a bit, he surfaced, but I was gone. Or he couldn’t find the boat. (Whatever, you know? I wasn’t going to tell him that I panicked, bolted, ran the boat up onto the shore and scuttled off into the night. That I was abandoning my friend, like my old man abandoned me.) So he swam to shore. It wasn’t that difficult. It was easy, he said. The most natural thing in the world. But, he laid low. Because he’d changed. Something deep inside him broke open. Something new and wondrous and alien. And he knew the world wasn’t ready for it, for him. This was his chance to start fresh. So he moved around, changed his life. He wasn’t the same old person. Not even close. This was his second chance.

Some story, eh?

So we arranged to meet up at this pub down by the docks to catch some music, some Norwegian black/death metal thing. It wasn’t quite my bag anymore—I’m no kid, you see—but, fuck, it’d be great to see Kenny. Great to hear his voice.

The place was loud, dark, smoky, and smelled of the sea. Smelled of dead fish guts and puke. A three piece band was on the tiny stage, pounding out some vaguely familiar speed thrash.

Kenny was in a corner. He waved, a long arm beckoning. I sauntered over, took a seat. He couldn’t have picked a darker corner of the bar. I couldn’t see Kenny at all, he was a hazy shape, shifting. Then he leaned forward and I saw his eyes, only his eyes, those same sad doe eyes.

I flagged down a server, ordered some pitchers of beer. It was too damn loud to talk, so I drank and listened to the band. Kenny didn’t touch his beer. I drank enough for the two of us. Eventually, the band took a break, and I turned to Kenny, raised my glass. “Cheers,” I said. An arm snaked out, and we clinked glasses.

I gulped down half a beer, wiped an arm across my mouth like a thirsty pirate. “Man, I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I really thought you were dead.”

Kenny’s dark shadow stirred. I could smell seaweed. He spoke, and his voice vacillated between a watery tremble and a sonorous rumble. A voice of deep seas and even deeper night skies.

“I’ve never been so alive,” he said. “Before, I never quite fit in. I was different. I don’t think I ever really belonged here. And I was right. There was something else out there. Something for me.” He gestured, and through the smoky darkness I caught a faint glimmer of an arm waving upward. “But it wasn’t up there,” he said. “It was the sea.” I imagined I heard a watery chuckle. “I’m a pirate, of sorts.”

Then Kenny leaned in, across the table, and I saw him for what he’d become, for what he really was. “But even pirates get lonely,” he said.

And I thought about what it means to be a friend, to be there for someone. Thought about what I was, what I’d become. Kenny was proof that people change. That I could change.

So I took Kenny home.

Kenny the Kraken smiled, wide. His mouth was large and deep and black. Dead things swam in its depths. His eyes were bulbous fish eyes, and they regarded me with sad, alien innocence.

I reached over, plugged the sink, turned on the tap. Kenny lolled in the water. I plucked a can of sardines from the refrigerator and began to feed them to Kenny. It was the least I could do for my friend.