Serpentine (2 page)

The tentacle rested calmly in the water, floating and drifting effortlessly like a snake while still hanging out of his mouth. As George did his best to get accustomed to his predicament, he studied the tentacle as best as he could. Its underside was white, freckled with spots of red. The little puckers on its underside seemed calm and at ease now, responding to the comfort of the water. A series of ridges and bumps ran horizontally across its glossy surface. Taking all of this in, the tentacle resembled that of a squid.

A brief flash suddenly rushed through his head, a memory of his work in the trench. They had seen hundreds of squid there, most of them small, but a few of them rather gigantic. Hadn’t Wilkins commented on how odd it had seemed that after a certain point, the only aquatic life within the trench had been squids? And there was something else too, something that Wilkins had said…he had been a marine biologist, so they had taken everything he’d said as gospel. But damn it, George could hardly remember any of it.

Especially not now, as he lay in his bathtub with a tentacle having erupted from his mouth. He would have wept if he could have mustered the emotional capacity to do so. But as he lay there with water pouring from the faucet, rational thoughts seemed a thing of the past.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat in the tub but at some point his wet clothes had started itching, so he took them off. Working his shirt over the tentacle was difficult, but it seemed to know what he was attempting to do. It clung close to his body and did not move as he pulled his shirt off. It moved of its own accord, operating separately from George’s body.

Time crawled by slowly and George could feel lunacy creeping up on him. He could actually feel it at the edges of his mind and it brought to mind how a corner of bread would go soggy if left in a bowl of soup.

After several hours, the water turned cold. The tentacle seemed to prefer this. As the water grew colder, it moved more actively and a bit more was freed from George’s mouth. When he had originally crawled into the tub, there had been perhaps two feet of it hanging out. Now, roughly four hours later, nearly three and a half feet of it had freed itself.

The corners of his mouth ached to the point where they were nearly numb. His tongue was nothing more than a sore lump trapped under the tentacle. His skull felt as if it was splitting down the middle and his lips felt as if they had been pulled from his skin by pliers.

George considered getting out of the tub and going to the phone, but recalled that he had been unable to breathe when the tentacle had been out of the water. He’d probably suffocate on his way to the phone. And even if he
did
make it to the phone, how was he supposed to say anything?

Forgetting this idea, he simply sat slumped against the porcelain, letting the tentacle explore the bathwater and his body. It studied his legs, his genitalia, and his chest, where it lingered for an extended period of time.

Somehow, much later, George fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was to a loud crashing from somewhere close by. A series of loud footsteps filled the house like thunder. Someone screamed out,
“Clear,”
and someone else bellowed,
“Move it!”

George sat up instantly and tried to scream but was, of course, unable to. He looked down to the tentacle and was suddenly alarmed. There was now at least four and a half feet of it taking up the tub. George also saw that hundreds of those small black things were clamoring over the surface of the tentacle, clinging to it even when it was submerged in the water.

George turned towards the open bathroom door as the footsteps grew louder, looking down the hall towards the living room. He watched as several men in body armor entered the hallway and began running towards him. George wondered how these men knew of his situation and then recalled the conversation he had shared with Dr. Kagle. This made sense, and proved his theory that he, as well as KC and Wilkins, had been lied to. The military and their doctors had known that something was wrong with them all along. They had been used to gestate these things.

As he watched the men rush down the hall with guns drawn, he thought of Wilkins and suddenly remembered something he had said inside the sub that had spooked them all.

“That
has
to be some mutated species of squid,
” he had told them when they had found a fossilized oddity compacted into the side of the trench.
“Or maybe prehistoric. I’m not sure
.”

And then, not too long after that, there had been darkness.

And screaming.

Something had enveloped the sub. Something had…

There had been much more, but it was all nothing more than a bloody blur of terror.

His memories were shattered as three men came into the bathroom with assault rifles raised. George tried to get to his feet but slipped and went splashing into the water. The tentacle seemed aggravated at this and began to churn within the water, splashing in a frenzy. George tried to stand again but was pushed down by one of the soldiers.

“Stay down,” the soldier said. He raised the barrel of his rifle to George’s head to punctuate this.

A few more men entered the room, all armed and dressed in some sort of dark-colored military fatigues. They parted right away to let two other men inside. These men wore medical garb and carried a large case with them. They knelt on the floor and opened the case. There were scalpels, saws, syringes and vials of fluid packed neatly inside.

George’s eyes grew wide and, almost as if following his panic, the tentacle rose from the water and darted out of the tub with incredible speed. It struck one of the doctors squarely in the face and the man’s head exploded in a shower of red.

“Hostile actions,” one of the soldiers screamed. “Sir, just give the order.”

In the half a second between the soldier’s request and his superior’s answer, the tentacle had found the other doctor. It wrapped around his neck and seemed to pass directly through it. The doctor’s head tilted for a moment and then fell to the floor where it rolled to rest at the sink.

“Fire,”
came the command.

The bathroom was filled with the deafening report of gunfire. George saw the flashes come but they didn’t distress him as much as what he felt within his body. He felt the tentacle writhing madly in his stomach, surging forward in all directions within his frame.

It leaped from his mouth with such force that he felt several of his teeth splinter. He felt it trying to find exits within his nose, within his chest, under his navel.

The pain was immense. When George saw a bullet tear into the porcelain of the tub, he prayed that one would take him in the head. He felt the tentacle pushing his intestines aside as it continued to erupt from his mouth.

Seconds later, George’s prayer was answered. A bullet hit him squarely in the neck. Almost instantaneously, his mouth was torn open as the tentacle pushed the last of itself out.

Despite the pain, George was fully aware that the tentacle had left his body. Blood poured from a ragged tear in his left cheek but it was the sweetest relief he had ever felt. The thing was finally out.

His body relaxed and sank down, sliding along the bottom of the tub. His chin caught the edge of the tub and his hazy eyes caught glimpses of what was happening as the darkness closed in on him.

The tentacle was its own creature. There was no body to which it was designated, yet the end that George assumed to be its tail looked incomplete, as if there was something much larger to which this monstrosity should be attached.

It looked like a leech when it stood on its own, only much faster and far more deadly. It was about five feet long and moved with a speed that betrayed its appearance. It was covered in glistening mucus that seemed to help it move with impossible speed along the bathroom floor.

George’s weakening eyes saw it plow through the soldiers, tearing and squeezing in a blur of blood and gunfire. The tentacle took numerous shots to its body but the holes that tore through it seemed to heal immediately. George saw men torn in half, heard their screams of terror and watched the tentacle in something like awe.

George felt the weight of the rest of his body pulling his head back down into the water that his blood had turned red.

He stared at the ceiling, waiting for the rapidly approaching darkness to take him. The light of the world was fading away, dancing like the sun on water, like the play of light along the hull of the sub.

Wilkins is dead
.

This had happened to Wilkins. And if KC had known that the things needed water, then chances were good that he was also dead.

Moments later, George noticed with a dulled realization that the gunshots and screaming had stopped. But somewhere else in his house, something crashed to the floor, followed by the sound of glass breaking—and that was the last thing he heard.

George looked to the bloodied water in the tub and then the darkness swallowed the light.

TWO

Wayne Crosby was on his fifth beer of the evening when the two black vans went speeding down the dirt road in front of his house. He’d been sitting out in the sun, ready to watch the tourists like he did every summer. But he hadn’t expected this. He’d never seen vehicles move so quickly down Kerr Lane, the dirt road that connected the majority of the vacation rentals.

The vans kicked up dust, taking the dirt road with treacherous speed. Wayne raised an eyebrow, as well as his beer to his mouth, but didn’t bother getting up out of his chair.

This was the first summer of his retirement and he planned to spend a great deal of it on his front porch—probably drunk most of the time—to watch the vacationers come and go. They came every year like clockwork, on the first weekend of summer. Some of the more ambitious ones came before then (usually retirees like himself from upstate) to get ready for a summer at Clarkton Lake.

Twenty years ago, the vacation traffic had been minor. But a few years back, someone had posted a news article on a travel website about the great fishing and quaint small-town charm of Clarkton Lake. And that had been that. The hive-mind of the internet had started and someone’s unique experience at the lake had become another generic vacation for families that didn’t want to bother with hauling their whining kids to overpopulated beaches.

Wayne watched the black vans pass by, the thick clouds of dust puffing up into the lower-hanging branches of the trees that cradled the road. He sat up in his chair and watched them go barreling further down Kerr Lane. Wayne considered getting in his truck to follow behind them to see what was going on. But he’d had just enough beer to allow his laziness to win out over his curiosity.

As the dust clouds settled, Wayne heard his phone ringing from inside the house. He was tempted to just let it ring but he thought it might be someone else from on the Lane with information about why those black vans were here and in such a hurry.

He got up, giving the dust clouds one last look, and walked inside the small lake house that he had been calling home ever since his wife had walked out five years ago. He left the door standing open, allowing the beautiful June sunshine to spill into the otherwise musty house.

He grabbed the phone on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

“Wayne!” It was the excited voice of Al Crabtree, the only real friend he had left around Clarkton Lake. “What are you doing right now?”

“Calculus,” Wayne snapped. “It’s the first day of summer. What do you think I’m doing?”

“Same as me,” Al said. “On your way to tomorrow’s hangover.”

“I’m sure your wife is so proud.”

“When I drink, it means I leave her alone. Everyone is happy.”

“Well, then…cheers. What’s up?”

“Did you catch a glimpse of those black vans?” Al asked. “They were hauling ass down your road. I just caught a glimpse of them when I was outside brushing up the horseshoe pit.”

“Yeah, I saw ‘em. They kicked up a huge cloud of dust.”

“Where do you think they were headed?” It was clear by the speed of his voice that Al hadn’t been kidding; he was indeed doing the exact same thing Wayne was doing—drinking away the first day of summer.

“Who knows?” Wayne said. “With all of these vacationing people on their way down here, it’s probably some emergency cleaning crew or something. Most of the houses on that end of the road are in bad shape.”

“I hear that,” Al said with a laugh. “So, you want to head out to The Wharf with me tonight?”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Wayne said. “But when you start hitting on young girls again, I’m cutting you off and dragging you home.”

“Great. That means I’ll be in bed by nine o’ clock.”

“Something else for your wife to be proud of.”

“She loves me for my many complexities.”

Wayne rolled his eyes. “Bye, Al.”

He hung up the phone and walked back out onto his front porch. He reclaimed his seat, killed off his beer, and popped the top on the small cooler at the foot of his chair. He fished another beer out and twisted off the cap. He tossed it into the little silver pail beside the cooler where the caps of his other empties sat waiting for more company.

As he put the bottle to his lips, he thought he heard something in the distance. He thought it was a woodpecker at first, tapping away at a tree, but that didn’t seem quite right. He paused, the beer held to his mouth, and concentrated.

There it was again—a hollow popping noise. Fireworks from some kids that were eager to get the summer started, maybe?

The noise came again and then again. He heard it six more times before it stopped. By the time he heard it for the second time, he was pretty sure he knew what it was.

Gunshots.

He took a gulp of his beer and began to feel uneasy. That sound had certainly been more of a gunshot sound than a friendly firecracker noise. On the heels of having seen those black vans racing down Kerr Lane, it suddenly seemed like a particularly nasty noise.

Wayne drove it out of his mind, though. He took his new beer back inside, taking the small cooler with him. He sat on his couch and fell asleep while listening to a John Prine CD.

It wouldn’t be until two days later when he’d realize that although he’d easily noticed the black vans racing down Kerr Lane, he never saw them leave.