by Tim Curran
More of those tentacles came in through the cargo door. And not just two or three, but a dozen, two dozen, filling the door with a squirming, seeking multitude of boneless arms that were draped with seaweed, many bigger around than dock pilings and concrete pillars. They flowed through the door like a mutiny of red, bloated worms, those suckers pulsing open and close, the tearing hooks scratching along the metal floor seeking flesh to rend.
And Cushing thought: This is no squid, this is no fucking cuttlefish, I don’t know what sort of blasphemy it is, but it can’t be real, something like this cannot be alive…
The tentacles were not just inside, but outside, too.
They were rustling and slithering over the outer hull with a rubbery, squeaking sound, those hooks scratching away over the metal shell like thousands of nails.
Then the plane began to shake.
The squid had seized it, was hugging it in a crushing embrace. The metal shell groaned and squealed with metal fatigue. Rivets popped like bullets, ricocheting off the floors and walls. Cushing was thrown down face-first, then rolled under one of the Hummers. Then the plane shifted again and he was tossed back up against the crates.
There were so many tentacles invading the cargo bay now, you could not see the night and mist beyond. They were just as thick and knotted as tree roots in a drainpipe. Writhing and convoluting things, a fleshy, living helix of ruby-red ropes.
Then there was a flash of blinding light and Cushing had to cover his eyes in shock.
But it was just the squid. Its flesh was studded with millions of tiny photophores like that of a luminous deep-sea fish and without warning, it had lit them all at once. Cushing had an image burned onto his retina of dozens of stout and coiling tentacles glowing just as bright as Christmas bulbs.
He was up near the Hummer in the rear now, hanging onto its bumper as those tentacles surged deeper into the cargo bay, wriggling and scratching madly like snakes in a bag. And that’s when he saw another and different sort of tentacle slide into view. This one was smooth like oiled rubber and ended in a concave sort of club that looked very much like the trap of a Venus fly-catcher. It was roughly the size and shape of a sixteen-foot canoe, tapping its way along like a searching finger. Then it rose up like a cobra spreading its hood until it was perfectly vertical, the upper tip brushing the roof of the cargo bay.
Cushing knew he screamed.
He thought he might have pissed himself, too.
The club was toothed with jagged spines all along its perimeter that were long and sharp enough to gut a man. The underside was fleshed in bubble-gum pink skin that was bumpy like chicken flesh. And as Cushing watched, that pink skin retracted, opened like the petals of an orchid with a whining sound like a punctured aerosol can and beneath… beneath was something like a huge, vagina-shaped mouth oozing tears of clear bile. A mouth set with dozens of black teeth that rasped together like cutlery. Surrounding them was a ring of red golfball-sized nodules that looked very much like eyes.
The mouth hissed at him.
But that’s all Cushing saw.
All he could bear to see.
He began crawling rapidly deeper into the plane as it shook and trembled and groaned, more rivets popping. Getting constricted by those other tentacles would have been bad enough… just ask Marx. .. but that obscene, toothy club was somehow worse. Cushing could almost feel it taking him, biting into him like the leaf of a man-eating plant, watching his agony with that circle of cruel red eyes. He was certain in his mad flight that the squid would crush the plane like an empty beer can and drag it down into those black, gelatinous depths.
All he could hear was the constant pounding thunder of those tentacles crawling and slithering in the cargo bay and the ones outside, sliding and scraping against the outer hull like a thousand windy tree branches rasping against the siding of a house. And amplified to the point that he could not hear anything else, just those tentacles in his head, moving and skating over the metal shell, animated vines and creepers and pulpy ribbons. It was the sort of sound that made something shrink inside him, offended and disgusted him the same way a million maggots boiling on the carcass of a road-killed dog would… all that twitching, slinking obscene life, it repulsed the human mind to its very depths.
Made you want to do anything before the sight and sound of that busy, fleshy profusion ripped your mind wide open.
The specialized tentacle with the club had retreated now.
The others had no intention. They found the first Hummer and spiraled around it, encircling it and deciding it was something they wanted. With a great rending snap, the Hummer was torn from its metal bracings and shorings and dragged out into the mist. The tentacles dropped it into the seaweed sea, where it went down in an explosion of air bubbles, then rose straight up like a steeple, lights pointed skyward. It began to sink again, but not quickly enough. More tentacles found it and pulled it under, its lights still working, strobing beneath the weeds and winking out, one after the other.
And then the squid sank away with it.
All those tentacles withdrew, leaving a slime of jellied emulsion behind them like mucus. The cargo bay was glistening with it, as if the gelatin from a canned ham had been sprayed around in there. And through it all, the battery lantern they’d hung just inside the mouth of the bay was surprisingly still out there, still working. But the only thing it was illuminating now were the snarled weeds and plumes of rising mist.
Nothing else.
George and the others had brought Gosling back into the plane as far as they could, up near the cockpit door. They had lit another battery lantern. Cushing was with them now, breathing hard and hearing the roar of blood rushing in his head. He was just beside himself, feeling like he was going to throw up one minute and go out cold the next. His face felt hot and cold and tingly.
Gosling was laying there, under a waterproof tarp. With shaking hands George was bandaging him as best as he could. Gosling was unconscious, moaning in his stupor.
“It’s gone,” Chesbro said. “It’s gone now, it’s really gone.”
“It’ll be back,” Pollard said.
Chesbro clutched his head in his hands, saying: “‘Behold now behemoth… he maketh the deep to boil like a pot…’”
George stopped what he was doing and turned to Chesbro. “You fucking idiot,” he said, feeling it all coming out of him now. “You fucking stupid piece of shit.”
Chesbro looked up at him just in time to see George’s clenched fist coming at him like a piston, something propelled and deadly like a torpedo. It caught him square in the mouth, snapping his head back and mashing his lips against his teeth. Had George any more room to swing, any more space with which to build momentum, he would have probably busted out a few teeth. But as it was, he split Chesbro’s lower lip wide open and slammed his head against the cockpit door with a hollow clang. Then George’s other fist was coming, but it was wild and just managed to clip the top of Chesbro’s head as he curled up like a hedgehog in a defensive position.
By then Cushing was on George, pushing him back. “Enough,” he said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough, George.”
But maybe from where George was sitting, it wasn’t. His teeth were clenched and his mind had gone stupid with hatred. The color drained from his face and he took a deep breath, his body going limp. “That fucking idiot… spouting that shit, spouting that shit at a time like this.”
Pollard just stared at it all dumbfounded.
Chesbro was whimpering now, something in him just shearing open at this latest indignity. He was hugging himself, rocking back and forth on his ass while his mouth filled with blood and it trickled down his chin.
“Just take it easy now, everyone,” Cushing said. He pulled a bandage out of one of the green nylon medical bags and made Chesbro press it to his mouth until the bleeding stopped.
Then he took a good look at Gosling. A real good look.
The bandages George had wrapped around his ankle were already tur
ning red, same for the ones at his chest. Cushing was hardly a medic, but he’d been through a couple Red Cross first aid classes when he’d worked at a foundry years back. He searched through the Army medical bag. It had just about everything you could imagine, most of it centered around treating battlefield wounds. He saw the suture sets and given the enormity of Gosling’s wounds, he knew a good medic would be thinking of stitching him up. But Cushing didn’t know the first thing about suturing and now wasn’t a good time to learn, he figured.
He removed the bandages at Gosling’s chest and poured some QuikClot, clotting powder, into the deeper ones. Then he took out a pre-loaded syringe of what the label told him was triple antibiotic and injected it right into one of the gashes from the squid’s claws, hoping he was doing this right. Then he placed self-adhesive fast-clotting bandages over the wounds and repeated it all at Gosling’s ankle. But he wasn’t too hopeful with the latter. The tissue damage was so severe, he doubted anything less than a modern medical team would be able to fix it.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” George asked him.
Rubbing his trembling fingers against his legs, Cushing said, “Some of it from first aid courses, the rest I winged.”
If nothing else, the clotting agents and bandages stopped the bleeding or slowed it to an acceptable rate.
“Let me take a look at your mouth, Chesbro,” Cushing said.
But he just shook his head.
Cushing told Pollard to keep an eye on Gosling and George and he slipped up behind the remaining Hummer. From the light thrown by the lantern, they could see that the nylon line they’d tied off the lifeboat and raft with had been snapped.
“Oh, shit,” George said. “If that raft is gone…”
And Cushing understood the implications of that just fine: marooned. Without the raft or lifeboat, they were marooned. Trapped in the steel coffin of the C-130 and like candy in a dish, the monster-squid would keep coming back until said dish was empty.
“I wish this goddamn night would end,” George said.
“We just have to hang on.”
George said, “If I can get at those satchel charges, we can take care of that ugly bastard.”
“No,” Cushing said. “You go back there… no, you’d be exposing your ass to that thing.”
Pollard came walking up. “I think… I think the First is coming around.” He looked out into the mist. “That thing… it can’t get us way in the back, can it?”
“No,” George told him.
But it was a lie and they all knew it. Cushing had gotten the only real good look at the thing out of any of them. And from the dimensions he’d seen, however briefly, he knew the squid was at least a couple hundred feet in length, maybe more. The tentacles themselves, he figured, were probably well over a hundred feet long. What they’d seen were just the ends. If the squid wanted, it could easily crush the plane or root around in there until it got all of them. Cushing was certain of this. Those tentacles would find them even in the cockpit.
“Look,” George said. “Jesus Christ, look…”
The weeds and mist were glowing again, which meant the squid was still there, still waiting. There was a gentle, rolling splash and a tentacle slid out of the sea and up the loading ramp, uncurling as it came on. It was one of the specialized tentacles with the convex, hooded club at the end. The club was very smooth and shiny, reflecting the glare of the battery lamp hanging above. Cushing figured it was six or seven feet at its widest point and probably nearer twenty feet in length than sixteen as he’d originally thought. The tentacle it was hooked to, was smooth and suckerless, big around as a centuried oak where it vanished in the weeds.
George made an involuntary gagging sound. “What the fuck is that?” he said.
But Cushing was beyond words.
The club rose up vertically as before at the edge of the cargo bay, revealing its pink, moist underside and the barbed spines gleaming at its perimeter. That pink flesh shriveled back from that immense concave mouth and black gnashing teeth. They all saw that circle of red orbs and were all certain they were watching eyes. Pink slime was dripping from the mouth, dropping in clots to the ramp.
“Don’t move,” Cushing told them, locked down hard inside like January ice.
Nobody did.
They just stood there, peering around the Hummer.
It was an insane, nightmarish scenario. The club moved up into the cargo bay inch by terrible inch. Once inside, the tentacle itself paused, but the club turned slightly to the left and then to the right like the head of a man looking or listening for something. Cushing had a sudden, unsettling memory of watching the movie, War of the Worlds, as a boy. That part where the couple are trapped in the farmhouse with the Martian war machine hovering outside and the sensory probe that looked like a Martian head came sliding in through the shattered window, trying to locate them. This was very much like that, for he had no doubt whatsoever that this club was looking for them.
No, no, not looking, but sensing, it occurred to him. It can’t see. Those things look like eyes, but they’re not eyes, not really. More like the eyespots around the bell of a jellyfish… looking very much like eyes, but actually light-sensing ocelli. Except in this case, maybe not light-sensing at all, but possibly heat-sensing like the pit organ of a desert rattlesnake.
It was sheer speculation on his part, a wild leap of logic at best based on what he understood of sensory physiology, but it sounded about right.
Yet, it was hard not to believe those orbs weren’t eyes. When that hooded club swept around, they glittered like jewels, like something with awareness and intelligence behind them.
Cushing was wondering if maybe that monstrous cephalopod and its attendant tentacles might just leave, figuring the food source in the plane had made its escape. But he would never know because Pollard was getting antsy. He was shaking like a man with a tropical fever, sweat rolling down his face in rivers.
“I can’t do this,” he said under his breath. “I can’t do this.. .”
And then he moved, turned and ran back towards the cockpit. The club jerked back suddenly like a startled cobra and that mouth hissed in alarm. It had sensed Pollard’s whereabouts now, whether through motion or heat or maybe both. And the sea beyond the ramp began to boil and the mist began to blow around as dozens of tentacles came pouring out of the weeds and up the ramp, coiling and looping like serpents from a snake charmer’s basket.
George and Cushing ran back to join the others.
Ran back and looked at those sweating faces and shocked, glassy eyes that were expecting to hear what their plan was. Hear about their defense or escape route, except George and Cushing didn’t have one. Because this was it. This was endgame.
The beast knew where they were and now it was coming for them.
George saw the first of the tentacles slide over the roof of the Hummer, three more slide under it and emerge with a swimming, serpentine side-to-side motion.
“Into the cockpit,” Cushing said. “Right now.”
George and Pollard lifted up Gosling and started carrying him through the door.
Chesbro was just pale and paralyzed.
“Move, goddamn you!” Cushing said, the stink of the beast bathing them. When Chesbro didn’t, he slapped him across the face. “Now, you dumb shit, unless you want your Behemoth to find you.”
That got Chesbro moving.
He leaped through the cockpit door and Cushing wondered, as the tentacles came worming and slithering forward, wondered how long that flimsy steel door was going to protect them.
And maybe he would have kept wondering it except he saw an eruption of light outside, from somewhere in the mist. A flickering, orange-yellow light like that of a bonfire. Whatever it was, the tentacles and their master became aware of it, too. They froze on the floor, in midair, hanging from the ceiling by their suckers. They began to quiver like a cat watching a bird. More of that flickering light and very close now.
Fire.
It was fire.
Out here… but how?
A tongue of flame brushed up against the plane, throwing a greasy, churning light that jumped and flashed. Gosling, looking down towards the passenger door saw the flames quite clearly. The weeds were on fire. And either they had ignited themselves or someone had done it for them.
“What the hell is it?” someone in the cockpit said.
And Cushing was wondering just that when a shadow cut through the flames outside the passenger door. A shadow hunched and jumped through the doorway. Cushing fell backward through the cockpit hatch, expecting the very worst.
But what he saw was a human being.
A human being with a pail of something in one hand and a burning flare in the other. They tossed the bucket at the tentacles and threw the flare. Flames erupted in a gushing, spreading cloud and the tentacles retreated instantly like worms on a hotplate. They disappeared in a column of funneling smoke.
And it was then that Cushing got a look at their savior.
It was a woman.
8
They saw it.
They all saw it, if only for a moment or two. Something sticking up out of the weed. Something circular, disc-shaped, and very large. It wasn’t a boat and it wasn’t a plane… at least not of the world they came from. There was a word for what it might have been, but nobody dared say it out loud. They saw it for just a few fleeting seconds, then it was lost again in the fog. Thankfully.
“What do you think it was, Fabrini?”
Saks said this to him, not really expecting a reply anymore than he would expect one from a pet beagle. Because he figured that, intellectually, Fabrini was on the same level as your common ball-licking, shit-on-the-carpet, drink-from-the-fucking-toilet beagle. On a good day, that was. Most days, you could play fetch-the-goddamn-stick all afternoon with that boy and he still wouldn’t get it. Sit there, wagging his tail and waiting for you to tell him what he should be doing and what he should be thinking about it all.
At least, this is how Saks was seeing things.