It brought those limbs forward, resting them on the gunnels of the lifeboat and all those wiry gossamer tendrils began to twist and curl and spread out like when it had first seen … or sensed … Cook. A surging, rustling growth of them flowed from the thing and covered the bow, filling the boat now, seeking new flesh to subvert.
And Saks found himself thinking that those hairs were not just a body covering, but possibly general appendages and sensory instruments to boot … muscle fibers and nerve fibers, organs of taste and smell and digestion.
Menhaus tried to climb overboard and Saks clapped him on the ear. “Give me one of those kerosene lamps and a flare,” he said very quietly as those hairs crept steadily forward, just a moving mat of them creeping in their direction, covering the bow seat and progressing, progressing, a tidal wave of surging, living hairs.
Fabrini put one of the lamps in Saks’s hands and Saks shattered it against one of the amidships seats, scant feet from those tendrils, and splashed kerosene over the advancing horde. He capped the flare and a bright red tongue of flame lit up the boat and reflected off the fog like neon. The creature did not know fire. It could not see as such, but Saks was willing to bet it had nerve endings. He tossed the flare at those kerosene-drenched fibers and they exploded with a gush of flames, catching like tinder, spreading up toward the thing’s body.
It began to thrash wildly, cheated out of easy pickings, and it had a mouth or something like one, for it began making a high, strident
e-e-e-e-e-e-e
sort of sound like a dying insect, the sort of sound you expected a spider to make as you crushed it to pulp under your shoe. It withdrew, flaming and smoking, filling the air with a nauseating, acrid stench.
It sank back into the sea, sizzling and steaming.
But it did not go away. Its hump was still visible just above the waterline.
“What now?” Menhaus said. “Oh, Jesus, what now?”
“Put that fire out,” Saks said.
Fabrini and Crycek splashed water on the dying flames in the boat and Menhaus grabbed the flare which was burning a trench in the hull of the lifeboat.
The hump began to move, vibrating and shaking, rising up now maybe three or four inches out of the water. It began to elongate and then there were suddenly two humps and they began to pull apart with a tearing, moist sound.
“Oh, what the fuck is it doing?” Fabrini said.
Crycek licked his lips. “I think … I think it’s dividing.”
And it was. Binary fission, asexual reproduction. Like a protozoan, it was splitting itself into two parts. The humps continued to move apart, both vibrating madly, strands of pink and yellow tissue connecting the halves as genetic material was shared and the cellular plasma membrane was sheared and reformed. Coils of white fluid like semen filled the sea around it. And then division was complete and there were two humps out there. Neither were moving.
Menhaus vomited over the side of the boat.
Crycek said, “It might be dormant now … we better get out of here while we can.”
Saks thought it was a good idea. He passed out the oars. “Now row, you sonsofbitches,” he told them. “Row like motherfuckers …”
It had been threatening for hours and now darkness came.
It was born in the stark depths and the black silent bellies of the derelict ships. It came rushing out in a plexus of shadows, shifting and pooling and spreading, connecting finally in a blanketing ebon sheet that fell over the ship’s graveyard until even the fog was consumed. The only hint of light being that dirty, reddish haze from the larger of the moons overhead.
“And how long, I wonder, will it last?” Cushing said to George.
They were standing on the boarding ramp with one of the battery-powered lanterns while Marx and Gosling went through the crates, calling out what they were finding. So far, they had found blankets and tools, three crates of boots, two of desert-camouflage tents. And about two dozen boxes of MREs, Meals, Ready-to-Eat, in military jargon. The replacement for the old C-rations. So they had a new food source. And probably enough to last them for months and months.
Gosling had a crowbar and Marx had a roofer’s hatchet-hammer for splitting crate ends. Both supplied by the U.S. Army loadmaster who had supervised the loading of the plane.
“Lookee here,” Marx said. “Satchel charges … pre-packaged, too. Set the fuse, toss one, and
boom!
These could come in handy, you know what I mean.”
They did.
George had used charges like that when he was in an Army engineer battalion. Had used them a lot more for blasting at construction sites. Packed with C-4, you could do some serious damage, you were of the mind to.
Chesbro and Pollard were up in front of the Hummers, sitting in the web seats. Chesbro was praying and Pollard was just staring off into space.
“Who can say what sort of orbit this place is in?” Cushing continued. “Night might be a few hours or a few weeks. Who knows?”
“Shit,” George said.
The fog was bad enough, but to be in complete darkness that long … well, he doubted that they’d all be sane by the time it lifted.
He tried to distance himself from it all. He kept thinking of Lisa and Jacob and how much they meant to him. Even the things he’d once dreaded seemed reassuring now. Jacob’s dental bills. Lisa’s chiropractor bills. The two ex-wifes and the alimony. The mortgage. Christ, it all sounded so good now. So comforting and safe. It was funny what the thought of impending death and madness could do to a person.
It could just change your outlook on everything.
“We can live like shitting kings,” Marx said, overjoyed at all the goodies they were finding. “Look here … flares! Now don’t that beat it dead with a stick?”
Gosling said, “We’ll never get all this stuff into the boats without sinking them.”
“We’ll just take what we need, come back again if we need to.”
“Yeah,” Gosling said. “If we can find this damn plane again.”
“Oh, but I got faith in you, First. Even here in the Devil’s own asshole, I got lots of faith in you.”
Gosling laughed and Marx launched into some dirty story about three nuns and a leper whose dick kept falling off.
George looked out into the mist. It was thick and roiling and lacey beyond the boarding ramp, something woven out of smoke and steam. The light from the battery lamp made it maybe ten feet before giving up the ghost. “What keeps you going?” George asked Cushing. “I mean, what keeps you sane here? Me? I’ve got a wife and a kid back in the world. I know I have to get back to them, one way or another. Every time I feel like I can’t do this anymore, that my mind is coming apart on me … I think of them. I think of how it’s gonna be to see them again. It gives me something to hold onto. But what about you? You’re not married, are you?”
Cushing shook his head. “I told myself I wouldn’t get married until I was forty and then when I turned forty, I told myself fifty sounded good.”
“Fifty’s soon enough,” Marx said behind them, balancing his hatchet-hammer on one muscular shoulder. “Christ, I was married six frigging times. Six. And all of ‘em meat-eaters and ball-collectors. Don’t be in no hurry, Cushing, to lacquer your balls and put ‘em in a glass case with a DO NOT FUCKING DISTURB sign on ‘em. You get married, only time she’ll let you see your balls is when it’s time to dust ‘em off. Oh, I speak from experience. My last wife, Lucinda … holy Jesus Christ, you had to see this one. She could de-nut the best. Even when we divorced, evil bitch only gave me one of ‘em back. I think she ate the other. She was special, that Lucinda. A week with her was like ten years hardtime. Her mouth was so big you could’ve slapped a sewer cover on it. Yeah, she was some kind of ball-buster, all right. Girl like that made a man want to suck dick and hang curtains and walk funny. Just the sight of her made my pecker go soft and my wrists get limp.”
“So why the hell did you marry her?” Gosling asked.
Marx winked at him. “Oh, because I loved her, First. Loved her dearly.”
The talk moved on to Marx’s other wives, all of whom sounded like growling, long-toothed things that had slipped out of the House of Carnivores at the zoo. Marx said his second wife was so pissing mean, he used to wear body armor to bed and carry a whip and a chair to tea.
“You want to know what it is for me, George?” Cushing said, now that Marx was on to the snakepit of his third marriage. “What keeps me going? Curiosity.”
“Curiosity?”
Cushing nodded. “That and nothing more. I don’t really have much back home, unless you want to count my golddigging sister who married Franklin Fisk who got us all into this mess. But what I do have is curiosity, see? For natural history and biology and living things. I like folklore and general history, philosophy and literature. A lot of highbrow crap like that. And this place? Shit, it’s awful, but I’m seeing things few men have ever seen. Ever lived to tell about. All those ships out there … you know what they are? Mysteries. The kind of things people write about and make movies and documentaries about. Things people will never really explain, all those vanished ships and planes. But we have the answers to all those riddles. We know what happened and I think that’s kind of a gift, don’t you?”
George didn’t think that at all, but he nodded. “We’ll die smart, anyway.”
He was listening to Marx extol the virtues of his fourth wife who apparently was some kind of cannibal who sharpened her teeth with a file and had razor blades shoved up her wahoo.
Cushing cocked his head to the side. “You hear that?”
George thought he had heard something, too. He just wasn’t sure what. But now he was hearing it again: a stealthy, sliding sound. It came and then went. “What is it?” Gosling said to them.
But neither of them could say and now Marx had fallen silent, too. The night was pressing down, misty and moist and clotted. The cargo bay of the C-130 made everything echo. They could hear water dripping and Chesbro mumbling prayers. Then … then something else. That sliding sound again. To George, it sounded oddly like somebody was dragging ropes over the outer shell of the cargo bay. But he wasn’t thinking ropes. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Only that to him, it was not a harmless sound, but an evil sound full of menace and danger.
Marx had joined them now. “What in the Christ?” he said.
And then, just beyond the lip of the loading ramp, the sea suddenly lit up with a grim and ghostly phosphorescence that spread out for what seemed hundreds of feet. It lit up the fog and made the weeds go luminous. Just some eerie incandescence coming from beneath the water and weeds themselves.
And then it faded and the darkness swam back in.
“Get away from that door,” Gosling said.
They could hear that stealthy rustling again, something — many of them, in fact — brushing against the outside of the cargo bay.
George and Cushing backed away, but Marx was not moving.
Gosling dropped his crowbar, came around the side of the Hummer in front. It was facing outward and he clicked on its headlights, two pillars of light stabbing through the darkness and fog. But there was nothing out there, nothing at all. Just the fog swirling about, the glistening expanse of weeds.
Then there was a splashing sound like something heavy had fallen back into the sea followed by a squeaking sound like a finger drawn over glass.
But what had caused it, no one could say.
They were all watching the fog out there in the Hummer’s headlights. It was thick and boiling and damp. There was another of those rustling sounds and then a tentacle came sliding out of the mist. It emerged with a sort of scraping, scuttling sound like some fleshy, blind caterpillar looking for a juicy leaf. It crept up the boarding ramp, looking almost curious. A slimy and undulating thing about the width of a pencil at the tip and bigger around than a man’s waist where it disappeared into the weedy depths. It was bright red with pebbly flesh and obscenely bloated, stout and powerful and flexing with muscle.
It carried a sharp, gagging stink of ammonia about it.
“Jesus lovely Christ,” Gosling said.
Marx was stepping back now, too.
The tentacle had not come up into the cargo bay as yet, it was busy searching around on the ramp itself like an investigative worm, like it knew something appealing was there … or had been.
Sure,
George found himself thinking,
us.
It coiled about on the boarding ramp, fat and full. Its beaded red flesh was the color of boiled lobsters and beneath, they saw, were triple rows of dun yellow suckers, puckering and expanding, a brown chitinous hook like a cat’s claw emerging from each one. These are what made the scraping sounds.
“Squid,” Marx said. “Big, shitting squid. Saw this big mother floating off the Canaries once, it-”
But he never finished that, for the tentacle shuddered and froze-up like maybe it had heard him, it twisted up upon itself, exposing those puckering suckers and hooks, and then slid back off into the fog. And you could almost feel the relief spread through the men, but it was short-lived. Very short-lived.
Two more tentacles came out of the mist. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth. They came out fast, sliding up the boarding ramp like blood-red pythons searching for something to constrict. Marx barely got out of their way and he didn’t get out of the way of the sixth and seventh. They darted out of the mist like rattlesnakes striking, one corkscrewing around his waist and the other looping around his left arm.
It happened just that fast.
So fast, in fact, that everyone managed to gasp and that was about it. Those tentacles found him like they knew exactly where he was, like they could see him. There was no hesitation. They came out of the fog and wrapped him up and with such force, all Marx had time to do was utter a low grunting,
ummfff
as if he had been kicked in the stomach, the wind knocked right out of him. The hatchet-hammer fell from his fingers about the same time and clattered to floor of the cargo bay.
“Oh my God,” Gosling said, simply surprised.
Those tentacles twined him up like a fireman’s hose, tightening and squeezing and Marx screamed, a high and shrieking sound of primal agony. And then like a vise, those vibrant red tentacles crushed him with immense strength. You could actually see their alien musculature flex and contract like a clenching hand. Marx’s eyes bulged and his face went a vibrant red, just as red as those tentacles, then purple and finally black. The tentacle around his waist had squeezed his midsection to the thickness of a forearm and you could hear bones snapping and things pulping to sauce inside him. He looked like a livid water balloon a child had squeezed in its fist … his torso and head, legs and hips swelled-up to the point of bursting from internal hydrostatic pressure. He gagged out foam and blood in snotty tangles and something bleeding and fleshy which might have been his stomach or intestines.