Terror Krakens

by Eric S. Brown

  There was nothing to do but try to run. The doorway had cleared of the things after Clark had gone down and several more of them had charged onto the bridge. That was where Captain Stevenson headed for as he pushed himself off the console and hobbled across the bridge toward it, dragging his bad leg along as he went. His speed was slow but his determination to make it fierce. Teeth gritted against the pain he was in, Captain Stevenson reached the doorway, grabbing its frame to support his weight as he caught a breath. Skin slicked with sweat and blood, not all his own, he stared out into the corridor. It was filled with more of the monsters. They clung to the corridor’s side walls, filled its floor, and two or three more hung upside down from its ceiling. Captain Stevenson knew he was dead even before over half a dozen different tentacles shot toward him and wrapped about his body, jerking him into the corridor full of hungry, waiting monsters. He screamed as their tentacles ripped away at his body like thrashing whips and their beak-like mouths removed entire sections of his flesh down to his bone.

  ****

  Ben had watched his wife Jessica be torn apart of some slime-slicked thing that resembled an octopus that had come into their quarters through its window. He was a big man and filled with a burning rage. That was what had saved him. His mind had simply snapped from the trauma of it or he likely never would have been able to do what he did. Ben had broken a leg from the room’s table and beat the thing to death with it before the monster realized that he was a threat to it. He had stumbled into the corridor outside covered in its blood, still holding the gore-covered table leg. His presence of mind was still such that he could rationally realize that he was in shock. He just kept thanking God that Jessica had wanted to leave their children at home instead of bringing them along for the cruise. If they had brought little Colton and Stacy, they would be dead like their mother was now.

  “Hey!” a voice called to him. The sound of it seemed so very far away. It belonged to a woman who wore a ship’s security uniform with dark hair standing nearly on top of him with the barrel of the shotgun she carried aimed at right at him. Another younger woman with red hair and freckled skin cowered in the corridor behind her, clutching a 9mm pistol. Ben almost lunged at the woman but caught himself in time to avoid forcing her to shoot him. It really looked like she wanted to anyway.

  The table leg Ben carried slid from his hand to clatter onto the corridor floor at his feet as he stood upright to his full six foot nine height. The thick muscles of his arms rippled beneath his shirt as he flexed them, trying to loosen up his muscles and shake off the numbness he was feeling in the wake of beating the octopus thing to death.

  “Don’t you fragging move,” the dark-haired security lady warned him as Ben stared at her.

  “What’s your name?” the red head shouted.

  “Ben,” he snarled. “Ben Rochester.”

  “I’m Samantha and the woman pointing the shotgun at you is Maggie. She’s going to get us out of here,” the redhead told him.

  “What’s happening?” he stammered. “A…thing…just killed my wife.”

  “I’m sorry,” Samantha said, frowning with tears welling up in her eyes. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “There are a lot more monsters like that thing on this ship, Ben,” Maggie said. “We were heading for the bridge but…that was impossible. We kept running into too many of them. That seems to be the direction the monsters are swarming in now.”

  “The things are all over this ship,” Samantha agreed, nodding her head violently.

  Ben shook himself, trying to get his thoughts together. Nothing was making sense anymore. A monster had just torn apart his wife and now he was facing two women with guns telling him that there were a lot more like it…pretty much everywhere on the ship.

  “You got another gun?” he asked the security woman named Maggie.

  “Already gave my sidearm to her.” Maggie jerked her head in Samantha’s direction.

  “Crap,” Ben mumbled. He was still in shock but coming to terms with the fact that his future looked like it was about to be fight or die. That was okay. He could manage that a lot better than dwelling on the image of his wife’s mutilated corpse lying on the floor of their cabin.

  “Well, if you’re with us then, come on!” Maggie yelled at him, making the assumption that he had joined up with the two of them. Frankly, Ben didn’t have any better option. He picked up the table leg from the floor. It was a better weapon than just his bare hands and followed after Maggie and Samantha as the two women took off running along the corridor. He didn’t have a clue where they were headed or even if there was somewhere to make a run for. It put distance between him and the cabin where what remained of his wife was and that was good enough for now.

  Ben could see how well Maggie knew the ship from how she navigated its system of internal corridors. She led the group to the ship’s armory and unlocked it. It was a small room and mostly bare of weapons. The armory looked to have been looted. Maggie had them head into it and shut the door behind them, locking it.

  “This room is the most secure on the entire ship,” Maggie explained. “We can hole up here until things get a bit calmer out there.”

  “We’ve got no water or food,” Ben said, scowling, though that quickly changed to a feral grin as he picked up one of the two remaining shotguns that hung in racks on the armory wall. He started loading the shotgun as Maggie glared at him.

  “You’re right,” Maggie told him, frowning. “We can’t stay here long but then I am hoping we won’t need to. Once those things clear out the few people left alive onboard, they will likely head back to wherever they came from.”

  “That’s a big assumption,” Ben said. “We don’t know anything about those things and where they came from. For all we know, they could be setting up a breeding ground on this ship while we are talking.”

  Ben noticed Samantha shudder at that suggestion. He hadn’t meant to scare her any more than she already was but there was nothing for it. Sometimes the truth wasn’t nice or pleasant but knowing it kept you alive.

  “No,” Samantha croaked, “they have to go away.”

  “Like I said, we don’t have a clue what those things are up to.” Ben finished loading his shotgun, shoving a final shell into it. “But staying here for the time being may actually be a good idea regardless,” he admitted, which calmed Maggie some. He certainly didn’t want to get into a power struggle with her. She looked tough as nails, not to mention she was the only one among them who truly knew the ins and outs of the Princess Dream. Having her with them might just keep them from being torn apart by those things when they were forced to leave the armory.

  “I think it is,” Maggie said. “For now anyway. Staying in here is a heck of a lot safer than just charging about blindly out there in the corridors.”

  “So what is our long-term plan?” Ben asked the security lady.

  Maggie cocked an eyebrow at the big man. “I didn’t say I had one.”

  “No, but I got the implication that you did,” Ben said.

  “If those things do leave the ship when they’re done killing everyone… Well, I figured we would try for the bridge again. The power is still on everywhere. We can use the communications system there to call for help and get the frag off this deathtrap.”

  Ben shrugged and grunted. It was as good of a plan as any he supposed. He turned to study Samantha more carefully, trying to look past how attractive she was even with her red hair matted to her scalp by sweat and her eyes swollen from tears.

  “Who did you lose?” he asked Samantha bluntly.

  “My boyfriend,” she answered in a voice that was almost a whisper. “He was trying to ask me to marry him I think when those things…”

  “Wow,” Ben sighed. “That is rough.”

  Samantha broke into fresh tears as Maggie gave him look that said way to go, you idiot.

  “You’re ex-military, aren’t you?” Maggie asked him.

  Ben nodded. “Did a tour in the Sandbox at th
e height of the violence over there. Made it home though.”

  “I guess we lucked out in running into the right person,” Maggie said, chuckling. “Between the two of us, we might have a real shot of getting out of this alive.”

  “Those things seem to die pretty easily if you get the drop on them,” Ben said. “I killed one with a table leg for frag’s sake.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have any idea how many of them are out there, do you?” Maggie smirked darkly.

  “I am guessing a lot if they overrun this entire ship as quickly as they did,” Ben answered.

  “That’s right,” Maggie agreed. “The last communication I had with the captain before I lost contact with the bridge, the guys up there were guessing at least several hundred of the monsters with more still coming out of the water onto the ship at that time.”

  “Frag me,” Ben grumbled, stunned by the estimate. “Where in the devil did they all come from? I mean, I’ve never heard of anything remotely like this happening before. And if it had, it would have been all over the news.”

  “Only if someone lived to tell about it,” Maggie corrected the big man.

  “You really think something like this has happened before?” Ben gawked at Maggie.

  “Who is to say it hasn’t? If those things do leave when they’re finished eating everyone, there won’t be much evidence as to what happened on this ship and no one alive to tell the story. You know as well as I do that the powers that be aren’t going to let something like this get public if they can help it. Easier to blame the massacre on something else and be done with it,” Maggie explained.

  Ben followed her train of thought but dang, it was cold. She was likely right though.

  “I guess we can’t count on any outside help coming then can we?” Ben asked.

  “Not unless someone on the bridge was able to get out a distress call before those things got there,” Maggie said truthfully. “If they did, then yeah, sure, but if they didn’t …”

  “Then we are on our own,” Ben finished for her.

  “Yep.” Maggie nodded. “Best to be prepared for the worst and assume they didn’t than wait on help that might never show up.”

  “No argument on that one,” Ben said.

  “How long do we have to stay in here?” Samantha asked, butting into their conversation.

  “What do you say, Ben, a few hours?” Maggie asked.

  “Sounds good to me.” Ben wasn’t looking forward to being trapped in the small armory that long but her suggestion sounded reasonable. In that amount of time, the creatures should be finished up and gone if that was what they were going to do.

  ****

  Dr. Emma Dane lowered her scalpel. There was no use continuing her examination of the monster’s corpse that was sprawled out on the table in front of her. She was a medical doctor and not even fully. Back on the mainland, her certifications would equate her to being a physician’s assistant. It would take a marine biologist to learn more than she had already. Emma placed the scalpel she held onto the tray of tools next to the table and slowly, carefully removed her gloves. As far as she could tell, the thing wasn’t carrying any sort of disease or virus but she wasn’t taking any more chances than were needed. Scrubbing her hands thoroughly in the medical bay’s small sink, Emma finally removed the face mask she wore and repeated the process with her hands.

  Commander Lewis watched it all impatiently, tapping one of his feet to a nervous beat that only existed inside his head. Burke had been the one who killed the thing on the table. It somehow climbed its way onto the Meridian Platform and attacked Harold and Watkins during their watch the night before. Neither of them had survived the attack but Burke, who had been on his way to check in on them, stumbled onto the monster while the thing was still feeding on the two men. Burke was more than just a pretty face. She was one of the deadliest soldiers Commander Lewis had ever served with. Armed with only her standard-issue sidearm, Burke had engaged the monster and ended it with a series of shots into the center mass of the monster’s body. No one had any idea what the monster was. None of them had ever seen anything like it, not even Higgins, who was pushing fifty-five and still in the service after decades of traveling the world on various battleships and destroyers before ending up being assigned to the Meridian Platform. When Commander Lewis had asked Higgins about the thing, the older man had shrugged and muttered something about a Kraken before returning to his work on the platform’s electrical system. Commander Lewis hadn’t pressed the issue with Higgins, knowing the man’s temper, and had instead ordered the thing’s corpse taken to Dr. Dane in medical in hopes that she could provide some answers on what it was.

  “Well?” Commander Lewis asked as Dr. Dane finally looked ready to talk.

  “What do you want me to say, Lewis?” she shot back. “It’s some type of octopus but not one that’s ever been encountered before. At least there’s nothing about it in any database that I can access with the storm raging out there.”

  Hurricane Castle was fast approaching the Meridian Platform and was already playing havoc with their communications and some of the base’s more weather susceptible systems. Commander Lewis had enough to contend with already without some creature out of a low-budget horror flick showing up to kill two of his crew for no apparent reason other than to eat them. That part really bothered him. Commander Lewis was used to death. Most people who saw active service were. But seeing what was left of Harold and Watkins’ bodies had gotten to him. They had been mostly torn apart and pecked at by the creature’s beak-like mouth. It had taken Warren and Lee over two hours to clean up the watch room where the creature had killed Harold and Watkins. Bits of them had been scattered about all over the place and its walls and floor slicked with their blood. A chill ran along Commander Lewis’s spine and he shuddered. Dr. Dane, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice.

  “I need more than that, Doctor,” Commander Lewis pressed her. “Where did the thing come from? Are there more of them? Are they a threat to this base? How is it even possible that they move about and breathe out of the water like they seem to be capable of doing?”

  “Whoa, hold on now,” Dr. Dane spat back. “I’m a doctor, not a marine biologist. I don’t have the training to look at that thing and tell you everything you’re asking for. What I can tell you is that the creature honestly is unlike anything that’s supposed to be out there in those waters. How in the heck should I know if there are more of them? The thing could be a genetic aberration or a member of an entirely new species that just now surfacing for all I know.”

  Commander Lewis fought to control his frustration. It really wasn’t her fault. She was right. But nonetheless, he needed answers. “What about—?”

  Dr. Dane shook her head. “The storm is messing with the comms. And you know it. What little I was able to hear back from the mainland about this thing was as inconclusive as my own work. On the upside, the thing doesn’t appear to be carrying any dangerous pathogens. I’m keeping Watkins and Harolds’ bodies contained though just in case. I’ll let you know if I learn anything more.”

  Nodding, Commander Lewis said, “Yes, do so at once. In the meantime, I guess I will just have to go with my gut on this situation and beef up security.”

  “Sure wouldn’t hurt,” Dr. Dane agreed.

  Leaving Dr. Dane to do her work, Commander Lewis left the medical bay heading for the platform’s main control room. His XO, Lancaster, was waiting on him in the corridor and moved to walk alongside him.

  “I take it that didn’t go so well,” Lancaster commented. He was a tall man, rail thin and several years younger than Commander Lewis. The blond hair atop his head was always a ruffled mess. His eyes were a sharp, intelligent blue. Despite Lancaster’s relative inexperience compared to his own, Commander Lewis knew he couldn’t ask for a better XO. Lancaster kept the Meridian Platform running like a well-oiled machine. The base was a need-to-know operation as far as the world was concerned. It had been built during the Cold War and st
ill served as an anti-nuke defense station. The place’s tech was constantly being updated to keep it modern, though all its funding was off the books. It was part of America’s front-line defense if the worst ever happened armed with dozens of surface-to-air interceptor missiles. However, the platform’s crew was a small one. The two of them represented the entire command staff, Dr. Dane was only the medical personnel aboard, Higgins and his underlings Kennedy and Jango made up the engineering staff, Robert was the comm. officer and tech, and Harold and Watkins had been among the eight members of its security detail and general staff. The other six included Howard, Mathews, Leonard, Hall, Burke, and Gray.