Lenny turned to run as three more of the monstrous crabs lifted themselves out of the water and scuttled across the sand.
Nature once again prepared to triumph over science and men.
-42-
“Park behind that building.” Milo pointed from the back seat of the black sedan. Eddie shifted uncomfortably, his butt half on Milo’s lap and half on Tyde’s, as if he couldn’t bring himself to make a choice between the two so he picked both. Cal sat squeezed against the left door. Wendy balanced on her husband’s other leg, her head bent and neck craned to the side to avoid hitting the roof. Stan, the largest of the group, took the passenger seat while Travis drove. A bulky computer console filled in the middle of the bench.
Travis slowed the car and pulled it behind the building Milo pointed towards. It looked like an old warehouse, the type of place they worked on boats.
“Are we safe here?” Eddie asked. He shifted again.
“Damn your ass is boney,” Milo winced. “We should have made you ride in the trunk.”
“Safe?” Travis asked. “Safe is a subjective term. Safe from whatever is in the water? Sure, I guess so, but we’re still a long way from safe.”
“Gee, that was uplifting,” Eddie said. “I was only asking if we were safe from your government friends. Like could they track your car or anything?”
“Track it?” Travis repeated. “I disabled the tracking device located in the vehicle, but that doesn’t mean they can’t track us with satellites. The island isn’t that large, so they should be able to find the car relatively quickly. And just to clarify, those aren’t my friends.”
“Could have fooled us,” Wendy snapped.
“I watched him kick the shit out of the two that shot at you guys,” Cal added, his face squished against the window. “It didn’t look very friendly.”
“Could have been staged,” Tyde added.
“You’re right, it could have been,” Travis admitted. “But why bother? What’s there to gain?”
“What do you mean?” Stan asked.
“My point is,” Travis turned to look at the people in the rear of this car. “That there is no reason, no benefit to me assisting you. Those people back there may work for the same government, but that doesn’t mean our directive is the same. If I was in league with them, you would be dead. You have no tactical value, nothing of real substance to offer. I’m sorry but you’re all nothing more than walking loose ends, so if I had the same goal as my friends back there, you’d all be bleeding out back in that ditch.”
“Thanks?” Milo said.
“Don’t mention it,” Travis said. “Is there anywhere we can get inside? I’ll fill you in on as much of the situation as I am currently aware.”
“We’ve got a place on the end of the dock,” Milo said. As he said the words, he realized that the pronoun ‘we’ no longer applied. There was no more ‘we.’ Jefferson was dead.
Everyone crammed inside the cramped interior of Milo’s dive business. The inside of the shack was lit by the orangey glow of the sodium lamps that hung high above the docks. Milo hesitated to turn on the interior lights, but figured it probably didn’t matter, flicked the switch and began passing out cans of beer from the small fridge tucked under his workbench. Everyone took one, except Travis. He set the can on the windowsill as he cast a quick glance around the docks.
“Everything alright?” Stan asked, his hand slipping over the handle of his gun.
“Yeah,” Travis said, but sounded unsure. “I just have a weird feeling, like something is about to happen. I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”
“You think you can turn off your Spidey senses for about five minutes and tell us what the hell is going on?” Eddie said and then unleashed a foamy burp. He held his hand out to Milo, who passed him another beer.
“Yeah,” Travis sighed and turned away from the window. “This started years ago –”
“Like a million,” Eddie interrupted. “Uh duh. It’s a dinosaur.”
“Eddie, shut up,” Milo said.
“Not the dinosaur,” Travis said. “I meant my involvement. I’m not really sure how long the government has been involved in this kind of stuff, at least since the Roswell crash, but probably longer than that.”
“Roswell? Like aliens?” Tyde asked. “Are you seriously telling us that not only does the government know about sea monsters, but aliens too? This is freaking insane. They’ve lied about everything. Every crackpot online was right.”
“First thing I need all of you to do is accept that the majority of conspiracies that you’ve heard are true, or at least mostly true,” Travis said. “Roswell, aliens, Sunset Island, sea monsters – all that crap is true and the government has known about it. That’s where I come into this. My job is dealing with this kind of shit, cleaning it and containing it.”
“So what, you’re some kind of super secret sea monster hunter?” Wendy asked. “Or is the government trying to capture one and use it as a weapon?”
“No to the first one,” Travis said. “The second is a little more complicated.”
“Complicated?” Wendy asked.
“I don’t hunt these things,” Travis answered. “I contain them. There are certain factions within our government that believe these creatures have military application. People like the ones who oversee those men back at Dean’s.”
“Aren’t you one of them?” Eddie asked and crushed another beer can.
“Like I said,” Travis continued, “same government, but different goals. I’m undercover within that division.”
“Our government is spying on itself?” Tyde asked.
“Does that really surprise you?” Travis laughed. “I’m here to ensure that they do not succeed in capturing whatever it is that’s down there.”
“Why? Because people are concerned about it being used as a weapon?” Stan asked.
“No,” Travis laughed again. “The people I work for don’t give a crap about the Geneva Convention or anything like that. They want to ensure that citizens remain blissfully ignorant. If people started to pull on one thread, the whole thing could unravel.”
“So how did you get pulled into this shit?” Milo demanded and tossed another beer to Eddie. He was probably going to be drunk soon, if he wasn’t already, but Milo figured he needed it. He had just learned that his brother was dead and that nothing in this world was what it seemed – drunk seemed like an appropriate response.
“A few years ago,” Travis began, “right around the time of the Sunset Island incident, I was tasked with investigating an incident in Roswell. It was supposed to be a simple alien contact situation, but it turned into a complete cluster fuck.”
“Aliens? What kind of alien cluster fuck?” Wendy asked, unsure that she actually wanted to now.
“Have you ever seen The Blob?” Travis asked. Wendy nodded. “That’ll give some idea. And while we’re on the subject, I’d recommend only eating free range meat or better yet, become a vegetarian.”
“Look,” Stan said. He pointed to a large shadow that moved awkwardly across the dock. “Milo, turn the lights out. Everyone be quiet.”
Travis slipped the goggles over his eyes as soon as the lights were out. He moved beside Stan and scanned the dock.
“What do you see?” Stan asked.
“Nothing,” Travis reported. “I’m not seeing any heat signatures.”
“That’s good, right?” Tyde asked. “That means nothing is out there, right?”
The shapes moved sideways, skittering behind a dumpster and a few parked cars. A car alarm let loose its banshee’s wail as one of the forms bumped against it. The hazard lights flashed, illuminating one massive claw and spindly leg.
“No,” Travis said. He clicked a button on the side of the goggles and switched them over to night vision. “It means there are four of them out there and they don’t have a heat signature. Could be cold blooded.”
“Cold blooded?” Eddie belched. “Like a fuckin’ lizard?”
>
“More like a crab.” Travis pulled his gun from the holster beneath his jacket.
-43-
Lenny hid underneath one of the rented vans. He pulled sand in from the sides to create a small rise on each side and provide slightly more cover.
A set of jointed legs, tipped in wicked points, scuttled past the van. Someone screamed. Maybe it was an intern. Lenny couldn’t tell anymore. All of the screams had melted into one long, drawn out symphony of pain and dismemberment.
A ropey coil of intestine slapped against the side of the van and splashed to the ground. Flecks of bloody sand spattered Lenny’s face. He covered his mouth to avoid screaming, but in doing so smeared the gritty mixture of blood across his lips and into his mouth. A coppery test coated his tongue. Grains of sand grated against his gums and became lodged between his teeth. Lenny’s tongue involuntarily began working at the grit before a gag stopped him. He vomited into the sand and quickly covered it, trying to bury the acrid smell that curled into his nostrils.
Ragged chunks of meat slapped to the ground surrounding the van. Lenny covered his head and tried not to listen as the crab creatures battled over the remains of his research team. Horrible clicking sounds filled the air as they smashed claws and gnawed on Lenny’s interns.
Gunshots sporadically cracked, but the space between the shots was growing longer. The government men were either dying off or had run. Lenny was alone.
The sounds of humanity were gone. The hum of the camp’s generators droned on, joining with the horrendous clicks of the crabs’ mandibles grinding flesh to create a hellish symphony. Lenny covered his ears and fought the urge to scream.
Hidden underneath the van, a cooling puddle of vomit soaking into his shirt, gritting blood coating his tongue and kinky length of intestine cooling nearby, Lenny had survived. Most likely he was the only survivor.
Lenny wondered if he had been the recipient of mercy or the one who was damned to suffer the longest. The sounds of the crabs devouring his research team would forever echo in Lenny’s ears, ensuring that he would never find a night’s peace.
Limbs, twisted to unnatural angles, and strips of torn flesh rained down around the van like confetti at Jeffery Dahmer’s birthday. Claws cracked and pointed anthropoid limbs speared the largest of the raw, red wads of meat.
Lenny had survived, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
-44-
Travis leapt back from the window as a claw the size of an oil drum crashed through the glass. It parted, revealing a snarled mess of spikes, and snapped shut with a deafening crack.
“Because a dinosaur wasn’t bad enough,” Eddie groaned. His words were slightly slurred, but everyone huddled inside the shack shared his sentiment.
Travis and Stan rolled across the floor, coming up on opposite sides of the claw. They both fired two quick rounds into the spiny appendage. If the bullets had any effect, the creature did not show it and continued to swipe at its intended meals.
Tyde felt something close around his ankle and an embarrassing yelp escaped his lips before he realized it was Cal’s hand.
“Under here,” Cal said from where he huddled beneath one of the workbenches running along the wall. Tyde pulled Wendy, Milo, and Eddie under the opposite bench. Stan and Travis continued to fire at the claw without much luck.
“We need to get out of here,” Travis shouted.
As if in response or to reinforce Travis’ words, a second claw exploded through the cheap wood that comprised the door. Splinters rained down throughout the small building.
The almost alien face of a monstrous crab loomed in the doorway, its black eyes protruding on flexible appendages to survey the interior of the structure. Stan lined up his shot. The crab’s eye exploded, thick blue liquid gushing from the ruined globe. The monster recoiled, but flailed its set of huge claws, rattling the shack and slanting the front walls inward. The roof shook and slanted, the night sky suddenly becoming visible.
“Let’s go,” Milo yelled. He held open a trapdoor that had previously gone unnoticed by the others.
“In the water?” Wendy asked.
“Staying here seems like a good idea?” Milo asked.
“What about the monster?” Cal hesitated.
“What about the ones out there?” Eddie asked as he dove through the trapdoor.
Tyde grabbed Wendy’s hand, interlocking their fingers and jumped into the water. They hit the water and began swimming.
The others splashed into the water beneath the dock and swam after Tyde and Wendy. A narrow strip of dock ran underneath the main pier and appeared free of monsters.
The sound of pointed, shelled legs scraped and scuttled across the wood planks overhead.
“Come on.” Tyde waved to the others as he used his other hand to pull Wendy from the water. “Try to be quiet,” Tyde urged the others.
Eddie, drunk, disoriented and the first one in the water, had swum in the wrong direction. He trailed behind the others. The water beneath Eddie surged and swelled. Something bumped him, throwing him from the water. A spiny claw shot from the dark water, closing around Eddie’s midsection.
Travis and Stan fired into the water, but the claw closed tighter around Eddie. He screamed and flailed, beating his fists against the spiky shell that covered it. The hollow thunk of his fists echoing across the frothing water. The shell creaked as the two ragged pinchers drew together. Black tendrils of Eddie’s blood twisted down the monster’s arm, only to be lost in the dark water.
“They’ll hear the guns,” Wendy said and immediately felt guilty. Could they really watch Eddie die and do nothing? The scuttling above became frantic, almost frenzied.
Blood swelled and burst from the edges of the claw. Eddie cried out in agony as the claws two sides snapped together, closing the distance and severing Eddie in two. A second claw snapped Eddie’s torso out of the air as it pin wheeled, trailing a fan of gore and flesh. The second half, spilling organs and offal, was pulled beneath the water.
Eddie was gone. The monsters were not.
-45-
The camp was silent. Even the dull hum of the generators had gone quiet, either having run out of fuel or having been destroyed by the monsters. Lenny lay under the van, anticipating a claw or pointed leg pulling him from under the vehicle. Nothing came.
Slowly, he crawled out from beneath the van. Dried vomit and sand coated his arms and chest. Lenny tried to scrape away some of the disgusting mix, but stopped after a few brushes.
Bodies, or at least had once been bodies, littered the ground throughout the camp. Mangled masses of flesh were strewn across the ground, some connected by tangled lengths of intestine. Lenny carefully stepped over what had once been a ribcage, the ribs broken and pulled back so the meaty organs inside could be harvested.
Science had revealed sights that many people would call revolting, but Lenny had come to terms with them, had found that the thrill of investigation and discovery tempered these feelings. He recalled his first dissection. It had been a pig fetus. Not too many years after that he entered medical school and dissected his first cadaver. It was strange at first, cutting into a human body, but once Lenny began to investigate the connections, the inner workings, he lost himself. The human body was an amazing machine, but organs and veins were really no more remarkable than plumbing. Yet somehow, this series of plumbing enabled life and thought. This alone had overridden any qualms Lenny felt about removing a liver.
None of those feelings or thrills came through as Lenny moved through the camp. Everywhere he looked he found death, not science. He had once seen the two as indiscernible, seeing death as the inevitable conclusion of the human condition. Now he could see his error. Death was unavoidable, that was true, but there was nothing scientific about these deaths. Lenny saw no science. Only savagery surrounded him.
A knotted coil of tacky intestine tangled itself around Lenny’s ankles as he stumbled through the camp reflecting on the folly of his previous, and limited, understand
ing of the world. He cried out and tried to free himself of the horrid snare, but only succeeded in tangling his other ankle in the mess and tumbling to the ground.
Rolling on the ground and frantically kicking, Lenny freed himself of the meaty rope ensnaring his feet. He stood and surveyed the camp one last time. Long, sweeping marks covered the ground, evidence of the crabs’ strange movements. Lenny worried that they may have returned to the water, only to rise once again when a meal appeared. But the trail of peculiar tracks leading down the dirt road told him otherwise.
The crabs left in search of food. That would inevitably bring them to the town. The people there would be unprepared, frantic. But where would they go? They were on a damn island and Lenny was stuck with them. The government agents had disappeared, having been eaten or fled. Lenny’s handlers would know by now that his research had been a ruse, maybe they had known all along.
A frightening thought raced through Lenny’s mind. What if his government overseers had known his true intentions all along? What if he had been deceived? Could he really have been so blind? They had known Lenny would draw the creature out of hiding, that he would drive it into a frenzy. The government missed what happened on Sunset Island, had missed the chance to study one of these creatures in action. They were not planning on making that mistake twice.
Climbing into the nearest vehicle, one of the rented vans, its white sides painted red and black with wide smears of gore and stringy bits of meat. The tires spun, struggling for traction and throwing thick clots of sand and blood. Lenny growled obscenities as he shifted the van into low gear and headed for town.
-46-
Gravity shifted, appeared to reverse as planks of wood lifted from the pier, spiraling into the velvet backdrop of the night sky or exploding in an upward rain of splinters.
Tyde ran, but could have run faster if he wasn’t looking over his shoulder to watch the pier disappear behind them. Wendy was a few strides ahead. She was always a faster runner. He was always chasing her.
RIP Tyde Page 11