Beast (34 page)

The tail of the creature thrust forward, driving the body farther up on the boat, driving the stern farther down. The bow rose out of the water, and from below came the sounds of tools and chairs and/crockery crashing into steel bulkheads.

“Go, Marcus!” Darling said.

“You go. Let me—”

“Go, God dammit!”

Sharp looked at Darling, wanted to speak, but there was nothing to say. He dove overboard.

Darling turned aft. He could barely stand; the deck sloped out from under him, and he crouched, bracing himself with one foot on the railing.

The creature was tearing the boat to pieces. The whips flailed randomly, clutching anything they touched—a drum of rope, a hatch cover, an antenna mast—and crushing it and flinging it into the sea. As it drew air into its mantle and expelled it through its funnel, the creature made sounds like a grunting pig.

And then its rampage ceased, and as if it had suddenly remembered something, the great head, with its face like a nest of vipers, turned toward Darling. The whips lashed out; each one fastened on a steel stanchion on the flying bridge. Darling saw the flesh balloon as the muscles contracted. The whips pulled, and the creature lunged forward.

Darling balanced one foot on the railing and one on the deck, and he raised the boat hook over his head like a harpoon. He tried to gauge how far he was from the beak.

The creature seemed to be falling toward him. The arms reached out. Darling focused only on the gnashing beak, and he struck.

The boat hook was torn from his hands, and he was thrown back against the iron railing. He saw one of the whips raise the boat hook, and drop it into the sea.

His only thought was: I am going to die.

The arms reached for him. He ducked, his feet slipped out from under him, and he fell, skidding over the edge of the flying bridge and dropping onto the sloping afterdeck.

He found himself in waist-deep water. He started to slog toward the railing. If he could get overboard, away from the boat, maybe he could hide in the wreckage, maybe the creature would lose interest, maybe …

The beast appeared around the edge of the cabin then, looming above him, its whips waving like dancing cobras. The seven shorter arms, and even the oozing stump of the eighth, reached for him, to push him into the amber beak.

He turned and struggled toward the other side of the boat. One of the arms slapped the water beside him, and he dodged to the side, stumbled and regained his footing. How many steps to go? Five? Ten? He’d never make it. But he kept going, because there was nothing else he could do, and because something deep inside him refused to surrender.

An obstacle blocked him. He tried to push it out of the way, but it was too heavy, it wouldn’t move. He looked at it, wondering if he could dive under it. It was the big midships hatch cover, floating. Lying atop it was the chain saw.

Darling didn’t consider, didn’t hesitate, didn’t think. He grabbed the chain saw and pulled the starter cord. It caught on the first try, and the little motor came to life, idling with a minatory growl. He pressed the trigger, and the saw blade spun, shedding drops of oil.

He heard himself say, “Okay,” and he turned and faced the beast.

It seemed to pause for a moment, and then, with a grunt of expelled air, it lunged for him.

Darling squeezed the trigger again, and the sound of the saw rose to a shrill screech.

One of the writhing arms flashed before his face, and Darling swung the saw at it. The saw’s teeth bit into flesh, and Darling was bathed in a stench of ammonia. The motor labored, seemed to slow, as it might when cutting wet wood, and Darling thought, No! Don’t quit, not now!

The pitch of the motor changed again, rose again, and the teeth cut deep, spraying bits of flesh into Darling’s face.

The arm severed, and fell away. A sound burst from the beast, a sound of rage and pain.

Another arm assailed Darling, and another, and he slashed with the saw. As the teeth touched each one, the arms flinched and withdrew and then, as if goaded by the creature’s frenzied brain, attacked again. A shower of flesh exploded around Darling, and he was drenched with green slime and black ink.

Suddenly he felt something touch one of his legs underwater, and it began to crawl up his leg and circle his waist.

One of the whips had him. He turned, trying to find it, wanting to attack it with the saw before it got a secure grip on him, but in the mass of curling, twisting tentacles he couldn’t distinguish it from the arms.

When the whip had circled his waist, it began to squeeze, like a python, and Darling felt a stabbing pain as the hooks in each sucker disk tore into his skin. He felt his feet leave the deck as the whip picked him up, and he knew that once he was in the air, he was as good as dead.

He twisted his body so that he faced the snapping beak. As the whip squeezed and drove the breath from him, Darling leaned toward the beak, holding the saw before him. The beak opened, and for a second Darling could see a flicking tongue within, pink and studded with toothlike rasps.

“Here!” he shouted, and he drove the saw deep into the yawning beak.

The saw stuttered as its teeth failed to slice through the bony beak, and skidded off. As Darling raised the saw again, one of the arms flashed before his face, circled his hands and wrenched the saw from them and flung it away.

Now, Darling thought, now I am truly dead.

The whip squeezed, and Darling sensed that the mist that dimmed his eyes was signaling the onset of oblivion. He felt himself rising, saw the beak reaching for him, smelled a rancid stench.

He saw one of the eyes, dark and blank, relentless.

Then suddenly the beast itself seemed to rise up, as if propelled by a force from below. There was a sound unlike anything Darling had ever heard, a rushing, roaring noise, and something huge and blue-black exploded from the sea, holding the squid in its mouth.

The whip that had him contorted violently, and he felt himself flying, then falling into nothingness.

“PULL!” SHARP SHOUTED.

Talley reached into the water and groped for Darling’s belt. He found it and pulled, and with Sharp hauling on his arms they brought him aboard the overturned hatch cover. It was awash, but its wood was thick and sound, and it was large enough to hold three of them.

Darling’s shirt was in tatters, and streaks of blood crisscrossed his chest and belly where the creature’s hooks had torn at his skin.

Sharp touched an artery in Darling’s neck. The pulse was strong and steady. “Unless something’s busted inside,” he said, “he should be okay.”

In a dark fog, Darling heard the word “okay,” and he felt himself swimming up toward light. He opened his eyes.

“How do you feel, Whip?”

“Like a truck ran over me. A truck full of knives.”

Sharp lifted Darling up and supported his back. “Look,” he said.

Darling looked around. The motion of the hatch cover made him nauseated, and he shook his head to clear it.

The boat was gone. The animal was gone.

“What was it?” Darling asked. “What did it?”

“One of the sperm whales,” said Sharp. “It took the whole damn squid. Bit it off just behind the head.”

There was sudden movement in the water, and Darling started.

“It’s all right,” Talley said. “Just life, just Nature.”

The surface of the sea was littered with flesh, masses of it, and each one was being assaulted. The tumult around the boat had been like a dinner bell, summoning creatures both from shallow and from deep. The dorsal fin of a shark crossed the debris. The head of a turtle poked up, looked around, then submerged again. Bonitos rippled the surface as they swarmed on fresh and helpless prey. Triggerfish, yellowtails and jacks ignored one another as they darted through the rich broth.

“Nice,” Darling said, and he lay back. “That’s the kind of life I like.”

“I don’t know where we are or where we’re going,” said Sharp. “I can’t see land. I can’t see a thing.”

Darling wet a finger and held it up. “Home,” he said. “Northwest wind. We’re going home.”

IT HAD BEEN created in the abyss, and had remained there for weeks, adhering to a rock overhang on the mountainside. Then it had broken away, as Nature planned it should, and, buoyed by a concentration of ammonium ions, it had begun slowly to drift toward the surface. In times past, it might have been eaten on the way up, for it was a rich food source.

But nothing had attacked it; nothing had shattered its integrity and permitted a rush of seawater that would have killed the tiny creatures within, so it had arrived safely on the surface and bathed itself in the sunlight vital to its survival.

It floated on the still water, oblivious to wind and weather, so thin as to be nearly transparent. But its jelly skin was remarkably strong.

It was oval, with a hole in its center, and it followed eons of genetic instructions and rotated itself in the sun, exposing all of itself to nutrients sent from almost 100 million miles away.

Still, it was vulnerable. A turtle might have fed on it, a passing shark might have slashed at it. Nature had ordained that many of its members would die, feeding other species and maintaining the balance of the food chain.

But since nature itself was out of balance, the gelatinous oblong rotated through days and nights until its cycle was complete. At last, ripe, it broke apart and scattered into the sea thousands of little sacs, each containing a complete creature. As each creature sensed that its time had come for life, it struggled free of its sac and immediately began to search for food.

They were cannibals, these creatures, and those that could turned on their brethren and ate them. But there were so many, and they dispersed so fast in the water, that most survived and dove for the comfort of the cold abyss.

Almost all should have been eaten before they reached the bottom, or the safety of the crevices on the submerged volcano’s slopes; at most, one creature in a hundred should have survived.

But the predators were gone, and while a few lone hunters did appear, and took their toll, there were no longer the great gatherings that had once acted as natural monitors. The vast schools of bonito and mackerel, the swarms of small white squid, the pelagic jacks, the herds of tuna, the voracious wahoo and barracuda, all were gone.

And so, by the time the creatures had crossed three thousand feet of open water and taken shelter in the cliffs, nearly ten percent—perhaps a hundred individual animals, perhaps two or three hundred—still lived.

They hovered, each alone, for each was completely self-sufficient, and drew water into their mantles and expelled it from the funnels in their bellies. Their confidence grew with every respiration. Their bodies would mature slowly, and for a year or more they would be wary of other predators. But the time would come when they would sense their uniqueness, their superiority, and then they would venture out.

They hovered, and they waited.