The restraining line drew taught; he felt it grate bone. A second later he felt one of his ankles pull away. Just like that: Snip! And his leg came down on the ocean floor, an exposed, grating knob of bone and torn flesh. More of the whipcords wrapped about his arms and waist and proceeded to drag him under.
Earl Youngblood struggled to the surface one last time and screamed his agony at the distant stars.
• • •
After four nights of unrewarded vigilance, George had fallen asleep. Leaning against his equipment in the deep shadows beneath the palms and sweet-scented pines thirty yards from the surf, he was all but invisible.
Youngblood’s screams awoke him.
George recognized it immediately as a man’s scream. The scream escalated, climbed several octaves above fingernails on slate, and then died in a wet, gurgling choke of pain and anguish. Beneath the bright stars, the sea was a turmoil of dark swirls and eddies, but of he who had uttered the cry there was not a sign.
George scrambled for his equipment, hands shaking so bad it took him three tries to get the cover off the portable sonar and, for several desperate seconds that stretched like an eternity, he could not remember how to turn it on. When he did get the scope switched on, the screen bleeped to fuzzy white, scaring him with its sudden brightness. Look everyone, here’s George! The white faded to a uniform gray and then, a second later, the scope received, sorted out, and composed the signals from the six transponders George had placed in the surf earlier that day.
On the screen, a huge shadow formed. Amorphous in shape, the thing appeared to be surrounded by millions of streamers undulating in the surf like snakes on a Medusa. The whole contraption, bulbous body and man-of-war tentacles, washed back and forth in the surf like a gently rocking bowl of Jello.
George stared at the screen for several long seconds, disbelieving the proportions the scale across the bottom told him were associated with the alien shape. Ignoring the spread of the tentacles, some of which trailed fifty feet or more in the surf, the thing was at least twenty feet across.
There were two other shapes on the screen. Smaller. Denser, if George was reading the scope correctly. One was swift and streamlined, darting in and out among the myriad tentacles, like a scavenger fish amidst the arms of a sea anemone. The other was still and lifeless, wrapped up in the leviathans tentacles, prey to the anemone analog, clutched close like a child’s doll. As George stared at the screen, too frightened to move, the tentacles began to pull the smaller shape apart, dicing and slicing as if the captured object had no more substance than a mannequin of clay.
George slumped to the ground before the scope, eyes locked on its ten inch screen, legs numb, barely breathing. His bowels were locked in a rictus of fear. He’d come here expecting... What? Hell, he didn’t know what he’d expected.
But he hadn’t expected this. This was something all his engineering, foundation upon which he’d built his entire life, could not explain.
What could he do?
Sit tight, Mother would say. It’ll all be over in a minute and then you can go home. Home is safe. Home is comfortable. We have thick walls, locks on the windows and doors, and Mother to keep away enemies, friends, and dates alike. Nothing can harm you behind your locks and your engineering, George. Nobody can touch you behind Mother.
He slipped his arms through the straps of the pack against which he’d been sleeping, shrugged its heavy bulk up on his back, and buckled the waist strap. The sea was churning a viscous black as he ripped the velcro cover from the I/O ports on the side of pack. There was a switch between the two ports. He flipped it on. The load on his back responded with a high-pitched whine.
The dark helmet he’d left atop the sonar scope was odd, totally lacking a visor or eye-opening of any kind. Across the face, where a visor would have gone, the helmet’s outer surface protruded beak-like. The raking lines gave the helmet an ancient, medieval appearance, a knight’s headgear minus plume, but the stylish shape was functional rather than aesthetic, designed to house the complex workings of the high resolution viewscreens and the array of microminiature mirrors inside. The viewscreen was the soldier’s window to the world around him, augmented by the best of today’s electronics. The mirror system yielded depth and dimension beyond that of a flat screen. The helmet’s outer surface was honeycombed with receptive facets the composition of which was, and would be for some years to come, highly classified.
George pulled the helmet firmly over his head. His eyes scanned the status panel and the panoramic viewscreen. There was a dangling control feed prodding his lower lip. He took it carefully between his teeth. A cable hung like a donkeys tail from the back of the helmet. His hands were shaking bad enough that he almost had to remove the helmet to get the cable plugged into the smaller of the two I/O ports on the backpack. It was a connection he’d made numerous times before, though never with himself strapped inside. He got it on the second try, then twisted till it locked.
The status panel below his eyes lit up like Christmas as the helmet powered up. Self test information scrolled across his screen, faster than his eyes could assimilate, but all he cared about was the final line: ALL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL. Using the control feed clamped between his upper and lower incisors, he selected IR from the lighted menu panel. The viewscreen leaped to infrared, giving him bright thermographic patterns. Midrange for the trees, darker background for the sand, and off to his left, the two automobiles, one a brilliant blaze, the other a cold ember. He turned to the ocean.
With the exception of the surf and minor temperature variations, the sea was a uniform shade of blood. With the control feed he selected DS. When the deep scan submenu came up on a corner of his viewscreen, he selected the average density for water and an average depth of five feet.
The screen shifted and there it was, duplicate in size and shape to what he’d seen on the sonar screen, but now in heat patterns: a central polyp just slightly warmer than the water in which it swam, cooling as the tentacles radiated outward. What remained of the leviathan’s prey was a rapidly cooling smudge of dissected pieces growing fewer by the minute. The smaller, fast-moving shape was a blaze of heat nearly as intense as the auto parked beside his Nissan.
George selected standard video, SV on the panel display, and turned back to his equipment. He grabbed up a khaki canvas munitions bag, slung it around his neck so it hung down across his belly, and then it was time for the final item in his arsenal.
The cannon was leaning against the tree where he’d left it. Black plastic, tarnished steel, and dirty-white ceramic where they’d insulated the barrel assembly, in no way a thing of beauty. It was a prototype, stripped to the bare functional minimum. As a personal assault weapon it was a failure: the power/control pack, helmet, and cannon combined weighed over two hundred pounds. Hardly something the average grunt would lug into battle.
Their thrust at AAW for the last year had been to reduce the size and weight of the pack, but there was only so much you could pack into so little. The damn thing needed one helluva power source. The cannon itself was as small as they could make it until such time as someone determined a means of making smaller, more precise focus and phasing mirrors.
George pulled on heavy, insulated gloves and picked up the cannon. From the weapon’s butt end dangled its own power/data cable, only slightly bigger than that of the helmet. He plugged the cable into the remaining port on the backpack and twisted. Almost instantly, he got datafeed to the helmet, a powerup and systems check and a new display superimposed over the viewscreen:
Targeting information.
George turned back to the surf, took a deep breath, and started forward, returning the helmet’s viewscreen to DS. At first, his feet didn’t want to move. The metal brace on his right leg, nightmare reminder, seemed to weigh as much as the whining equipment on his back.
He told himself this was for Cheryl, but a voice in the back of his head insisted it was for himself.
“Come on!” George screamed
at the thermographically defined shape just the other side of the breakers. “Come out where I can see you!”
Nothing.
George reached into the munitions pouch and drew out a thermite charge. He looked at it for a second, so foreign in his hand (Who’d have ever thought he’d one day be using some of the very same weapons developed during his twenty years at the lab?), then popped the detonator and tossed it into the surf.
“Munch on that, you son of a bitch.”
The resolution on the deep scan wasn’t high enough to show something as small as the thermite as it sank, but George knew precisely where it was a moment later when heat blossomed in a bright starburst beneath the waves. There was a dull whump and the ocean erupted in a geyser of sea and sand. George stumbled back as the deluge came down on his head.
The ocean had deadened the sound of the explosion enough that George didn’t expect to attract any attention, but a second later he heard sirens approaching on Highway 60. With his thumb, he flipped both safeties off the cannon.
Behind the thermite-born geyser came a second eruption. George’s nightmare surged forth, phosphorous gelatin, cilia-coated maw, and tentacles shimmering like silver tinsel. George switched the helmet to SV as the great vomitous mass flopped up on the beach, a gelatinous blob, translucent veneer over boiling ichors of pink and green. The thermite charge had left burning holes in its sides from which pus-colored juices gushed forth to sizzle on the sand. The thing reeked of blood and brine, dragging with it something that might have once been a man’s torso.
First semester physics told him something that big, with no internal or external bone structure, should not be able to move, should in fact lie flaccid, a Newtonian prisoner caught in Earth’s oldest trap, but there it was, advancing on sluggish pseudopodia and lashing tendrils. Less mobile perhaps in this environment than its native sea, but certainly not a beached jellyfish. Within a gaping, oozing hole left by the thermite charge, George spotted something of a bone structure. The pink gelatinous flesh within was interlaced with fine crystalline fibers, each jutting like barely visible porcupine quills, originating from some hidden central nucleus. The only explanation was that these fine spines supplied the rigidity the beast needed to support its own mass and provide locomotion. But God, the strength and rigidity of each spine must be greater than tungsten steel to support those tons of jellyfish! Then he remembered the strength of the tentacles. Like piano wire, Doctor Fennimore had said. Did the spines actually extend beyond the polyp’s translucent flesh to become the wire-like tendrils, one of which had nearly removed George’s leg?
George’s engineering half cataloged all these details as the monstrosity surged from the sea, while his human side reacted on a purely visceral level. As tentacles slapped at the sand, reaching ever closer, he bit through the helmet’s control feed. One tentacle slapped at his arm, taking out a chunk of cloth and flesh. Another wrapped around the familiar right calf, this time finding stainless steel rather than flesh. Still, the tentacle drew tight and George knew he had mere seconds before the leviathan pulled him off his feet. Screaming, George used the blinking red target indicator on his viewscreen to line up the barrel of the cannon. He pulled the trigger.
The night was split in twain as a shaft of intense light burst from the muzzle of the weapon. George’s helmet screen filtered the blaze to wavelengths safe for the human eye, otherwise the spillage to each side would have been enough to blind him.
He raked the beam across the leviathan, burning a wide swathe through the bulbous central polyp. The wound sprayed him with reeking caustic juices, fluid that sizzled acid-like where it hit. He felt hot pain across his arms and legs. Several areas of his viewscreen died, pixels fading to black as the helmet’s receptors were burned out.
Ignoring the burning pain and failing viewscreen, George swept the laser cannon back, ripping another gash, parallel twin to the first, across the creature. “SDI technology, you jellyfish motherfucker!” he screamed.
The beast surged forward on a million projected feet, its undulating swarm of tentacles doubling their efforts to reach him, carrying the creature forward at a rate George would never have imagined possible. He swept the laser down and across the straining chromium fibers, dropping hundreds of them like writhing snakes to the sand. Then the one wrapped about his leg brace yanked, and the world rolled over on George Cooper.
Arms flailing, George went down. As he fell, the laser beam played havoc through the trees, slicing and igniting palm and pine trunks, sweeping across both cars parked just off the beach. The roof of the Maxima disappeared neat as you please. Youngblood’s rental car exploded, illuminating the entire beach.
George hit the ground, the bulky pack near breaking his back in the fall. As trees and autos burst into flames, he let off the cannon’s trigger. A great wet plop near his splayed legs alerted him to the beast struggling forward to reach him. George rolled over on his belly, trying to get to his feet, but the line was still taut about his right leg. He looked back to find the monster’s gaping maw just a yard short of clamping down on his legs. It chomped greedily, two shelled oysters, giant and festering, slapping together like something out of a pornographic nightmare. As razored tentacles swarmed over him, George shoved the muzzle of the laser cannon at the gaping mouth and pulled the trigger.
The laser burned like a small sun. The gelatinous blob shuddered. Juices sprayed, killing all but a small portion of George’s video reception. George felt wire biting through his flesh and the warm flow of blood on back, shoulders, left thigh, and both arms. A second later, the laser died as tentacles cut through the power cable. George found himself bleeding, blind inside the dead helmet.
But he was winning. The beast was oozing back toward the surf, leaving most of its mass burning like napalm on the sand. George shrugged free of the backpack and shucked the useless helmet. Trailing flesh-locked fragments of tentacles still writhing and sticky wet with his blood, George scrambled after his enemy. Even weak-kneed with pain and rapidly losing blood like he was, George was faster than the fleeing leviathan. The creature’s habitat was the ocean where it could move freely, no doubt with speed and fluid grace. George had no intention of letting it get that far.
He pulled two thermite charges from his sack, flipped the detonator on both, and stuffed his arm deep into the gaping flesh of the fleeing leviathan. His hand came out minus charges and heavy glove, sizzling with acidic juices, burning like it’d been flayed and doused with alcohol. George scrambled backwards, fighting free of tentacles that clung razor-sharp and bone-deep to his flesh. His nerves sang a cacophony of pain as hundreds of cuts screamed and bled. Ripping free of the beast’s half-hearted attempt to drag him with it into the sea, George turned and stumbled up the beach, fighting to stave off the dark nebulae flaring just back of his vision.
The thermite explosions were nearly simultaneous, first lifting, then slamming George to the ground so hard the sand tore flesh from his face. His hair and the clothes on his back were scorched. Both would have caught fire had they not been drenched with saltwater, ooze, and sweat. There was a brightness in George’s head that lasted a very long time, then it dissolved to deepest black...
• • •
Flashing lights. Red and blue. Revolving. Pulsating on the viewscreen the inside of his eyelids had become.
Someone pried up one of those twin screens and peered in at him, one great cyclopean eye. The red and blue lights shone in around the intruding eye, blinding George.
“Guy’s still alive, Pete. Call for an ambulance.”
Footsteps.
There was something burning. The Pontiac that had been parked next to his Maxima. The trees.
God, he hurt. Everywhere.
“Just lie still, buddy. We’ve got an ambulance coming.” Policeman. Authority. Safety.
With those thoughts in mind, George let himself sink back beneath the surface of the quicksand that was his mind.
• • •
Dreams. Delir
ium. George found he couldn’t separate fact from fiction from memory from pain-induced hallucinations from...
The cop standing over him uttered a muffled “Grumpf” as if his dinner had decided to come back up but found the throat clamped off. Something wet splashed across the ground to George’s left. Then, a dull thump as the cop’s body followed.
George elected not to open his eyes. Whatever was happening, the cops could handle it. He’d already done the hard part. Hadn’t he?
• • •
“George?”
He struggled to a sitting position and there she was.
Cheryl.
She was naked. Her body, a captivatingly proportioned arrangement of light and shadow, glistened in the flickering firelight. Her copper hair hung wet over her shoulders, burnt orange beneath the hungry glare. She walked languidly across the sand, legs surrealistically long, approaching not from the water, but from the burning trees. George thought he saw a body there, an indecipherable lump on the ground, shadow amongst shadows.
There was another body beside him, dressed in a dark blue uniform, polished black shoes, leather holster with service revolver, gleaming badge... ripped out throat.
George drew the dead cop’s gun and pointed it at Cheryl. “Stop. Just stop there for a minute.” The gun was shaking uncontrollably in his hand. “I’ve got to figure this out.”
“It’s me, George. It’s Cheryl.” She took two more cautious steps toward him.
“Yeah, right. Look, just stop.” He cocked the revolver and gripped it with both hands. “Stop!”
Cheryl stopped.
“I need a minute to think this through.”
“Sure, George.”
His head was reeling, fuzzy, distant. Someone had opened it up and replaced his brain with a roll of toilet tissue. “I thought you were dead.”
“Do I look dead?”
She looked as beautiful as he remembered her. Despite the ache in every muscle of his body, he was acutely aware of how tantalizing she was.
Salt Water Tears Page 12