Dead Sea (54 page)

He looked like a deep-sea fish that had undergone fast, massive decompression.

And this happened in the span of about five seconds.

Five seconds that passed with disturbing, hallucinogenic clarity for the men that witnessed them.

George screamed and fell on his ass.

Gosling came running, shouting and screeching, the crowbar magically in his hands again and he made it right to the bloody, smashed hulk of Marx just as those tentacles gave him a final squeeze to make sure the fight was taken out of him. A gout of blood and tissue vomited from Marx’s distorted mouth and splashed across the front of Gosling’s shirt, but it didn’t even slow him down. He came on swinging, hammering the crowbar into two slimy tentacles that sought him out. They recoiled instantly and were replaced by two others that did not recoil.

Marx’s corpse was upended and yanked out into the mist with such force that his head struck the loading ramp, his bloody scalp peeling free.

George was on his feet by then.

Or was for a moment or two. As he got up, a tentacle swung out for Gosling and he ducked under it and it hit George in the chest, hit him like a railroad tie. Knocked him up and against the wall of the cargo bay and he slumped over, barely avoiding another which snaked back around in a question mark, seeking his head.

Dazed, confused, the wind kicked out of him, George saw another tentacle coming at him, coiling and slimy and evil, and all he could think was what it was going to feel like when those hooks sank in him and those muscles squeezed his insides to paste.

“Look out, George!” someone cried. “Oh, Jesus, look out …”

Cushing heard that voice cry out and saw that tentacle squirming in George’s direction and he reacted without thinking.

He grabbed George by the ankle — that slick tentacle passing so close to his face that he could smell the stink of the rotting sea bottom on it — and dragged him over near the Hummer. And did it fast, that tentacle coming back around like scythe, looking for something to squeeze. At any other time, he knew, he would have had to grab George’s legs in both hands and then done a lot of puffing and struggling … but at that moment, his adrenaline was amped so high, he just grabbed that one ankle and yanked George away like he was stuffed with dry hay.

As he turned, he saw something that nearly drove him insane.

Just a momentary glimpse, but it was sheer poison. Fifty or sixty feet away, the mist parted momentarily to give him a view of something that curdled him straight to the marrow. Spotlighted in the Hummer’s headlights, he saw Marx’s corpse being fed into a gargantuan puckered mouth the size of a train tunnel. Saw that tentacle stuff Marx’s remains in there like a tasty treat. Into that gigantic chewing hole that was filled with a corkscrewing series of flabby tongues that peeled him down to a skeleton in seconds.

Then the mist closed in, covered the atrocity of that mouth and Cushing saw something like a huge yellow eye big as a wagon wheel looking right at him. Then it was invisible, too.

Three more tentacles swooped in out of the mist with a surprising, violent speed. One of them knocked Gosling on his ass and another entwined his ankle and still another brushed across his chest, those glistening hooks ripping open the front of his shirt and his chest with it.

“Get back!”
he screeched to the men,
his
men, his voice raw with pain. He thrashed and panted and howled.
“Get back oh Jesus get back-”

Cushing jumped forward, dodging under and around whipping, angry tentacles, picked up Marx’s hatchet-hammer and swung it with everything he had at another tentacle reaching for Gosling. The blade split open that greasy, beaded red flesh and a spray of brown blood broke against his face with a burning sensation.

The tentacle which had been dragging Gosling off jerked as Cushing chopped into the other one. It jerked violently and unclenched, tossing Gosling through the air. He slammed into the front of the Hummer, collapsing over George. His ankle where the squid had him was eaten right down to the bone.

George was dragging him off then, mumbling and whimpering under his breath and Chesbro and Pollard had been finally shocked out of their stupor. They came forward, helping George pull Gosling back into the plane, beyond the Hummers.

Cushing dodged and ducked and made it to the Hummer. One searching tentacle tripped him, but he made it out of its reach and then the shit really started to rain down. For that grotesque monster squid knew there was food in the shell of that plane and it intended on having it.

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 turning 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.