The Creeping Kelp (15 page)

The soldiers poured volley after volley into the vegetation, to no effect.

“Break out the acid,” Noble heard Mitchell shout.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Suzie stood there, her face pale, which only accentuated the redness of the line of blood that ran from her hairline down the left side as far as her earlobe.

Three of the marines strapped on what looked like oxygen tanks attached to short, almost pistol-like hand-held hoses.

“Fire at will,” Mitchell shouted.

Like firemen hosing flames, the marines sent a spray of acid over the Shoggoths nearest the chopper. The result was immediate. The vegetation retreated fast, pulling away from the falling fluid, leaving bubbling and hissing fragments behind where the acid hit its target.

Noble let out a small involuntary yelp of triumph, but he had celebrated too soon. The
ground
buckled beneath them, like a beast in the throes of pain. The marine nearest Noble, one with an acid tank on his back, fell heavily. The plastic beneath him opened like a mouth and closed again, tight, around the soldier’s waist. The man immediately started to scream. That, too, was short lived. Blood ran from his lips. He coughed, once, and the blood became a fountain. The plastic
snipped –
and the marine’s upper torso fell forward, cleanly cut away from the part that was embedded in the surface underfoot.

Suzie stepped forward. At first, Noble thought she was intent on trying to help the man, but he soon saw what she meant to do.

She means to take the acid tank.

Noble moved to get there first. The ground buckled again as he tried to un-strap the tank from the dead weight of the torso. Suzie steadied him and helped him strap the tank on, the weight of it threatening to overbalance him until he found the trick of redistributing his centre of balance by leaning slightly forward.

The ground bucked again, a series of
mouths
appearing around them, as if something was fishing—fishing for men.

Mitchell called out.

“To me. Fall back.”

Noble didn’t have to be told twice. He followed as Mitchell led the team away from the chopper and the opening
mouths
. The Shoggoths wasted no time in slithering over the chopper. In seconds, it had disappeared under a mound of kelp.

Noble saw Mitchell look back and caught the brief, but obvious, despair that showed on his face. Just as obvious, was the way the young officer pushed it away to focus on the survival of his team.

“In here,” the Lieutenant said and stood to one side, motioning at a semicircular opening in one of the
buildings
. Noble and Suzie held back, at first, but the marines, used to obeying first and asking questions later, showed no hesitation, filing through and taking positions so that each man was covered by another. Noble was last in.

By the time he turned and looked outside, he could no longer even see where the chopper had been. Several Shoggoths crawled lazily over what was once again a smooth, even surface. They seemed to have lost all interest in the occupants of the craft and were now dispersing to different parts of the
c
ity.

Noble turned to Mitchell and motioned at the backpack he carried.

“Tell me we’ve got a radio?”

Mitchell shook his head.

“I’m carrying enough C4 to blow a hole in the planet. But the only radio with the range needed to get a message to the mainland was on the chopper. We’re on our own.”

“What about a rescue?”

Mitchell looked Noble in the eye and said nothing. He didn’t have to.

Looks like this was a one way trip.

He looked around the
room
. They seemed to have come in the only thing that might resemble an entrance or exit. In fact, Noble thought the whole chamber might be no more than an artefact of the way the structure had been built by the Shoggoths, rather than any attempt to make a room, as such. The place was built out of more of the recycled plastics, the walls looking like a patchwork of stained glass windows of different coloured materials and papers, with thin sunlight and scudding clouds laying multi-fractal patterns all around them. It was strangely beautiful, but at the same time terrifying in its sheer strangeness. 

Suzie seemed rapt and had turned on her full-on science geek mode. The eight marines, on the other hand, were all business.

“What’s the plan, Lieutenant?” Noble asked, as one of the marines helped him out of the harness and took the tank from him.

Mitchell was still looking out over where the chopper –and the dead marine—had disappeared from view.

“We came here to do a job. That hasn’t changed.”

He turned to Noble.

“How’s your sense of direction? You said the boat was on the edge of a large park?”

Noble nodded and pointed to where he hoped was West.

“That way. But it’s a bit of a walk, if I’m right. At least a mile.”

Mitchell grinned.

“This team walked more than that through hostile territory in Tehran. I think we can handle it.”

As one, the marines replied.

“Yes sir!”

Noble looked out over the
street
. A single Shoggoth slumped along on the far side, carrying a lump of black plastic almost as big as itself. There was no other sign of movement.

“It’s as if they don’t see us as a threat,” Suzie said at his side.

Mitchell came to stand beside them.

“Let’s see if we can do something about that,” he said, then called to his team. “Okay lads. Saddle up. We’re moving out.”

Noble and Suzie fell into the middle of a line of Marines and Noble’s grip on Suzie’s hand tightened as they walked into the street.

The city could almost have passed for any on the mainland on a quiet Sunday morning.

Almost
.

It was only when Dave looked closer that he could see the mosaic of recycled material, or a piece of plastic from something he
nearly
recognised. At some points, he was able to make out a roiling, seething sea beneath, but the
ground
, such as it was, felt firm enough underfoot. No matter how normal it all seemed, this was far from a Sunday stroll. The men around were tense and sullen, ready to avenge their dead. A piece of plastic crackled on their left-hand side and before Mitchell could stop him, one of the marines hosed the whole area with acid.

Everything went quiet for the space of several seconds. A thin column of acrid smoke wafted above them before being dispersed in a light breeze. And on the same breeze, came a response, a high keening sound that Noble was coming to know—fear.

Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.

“Run,” he shouted to Mitchell. “We need to get out of here.  Right now.”

To his credit, the Lieutenant did not hesitate.

“Move out. And heads up. We’ve got incoming.”

The small squad broke into a run. Noble and Suzie kept pace in the middle of the team, hard pressed to maintain their positions as they ran through
streets
that suddenly seemed even less inviting than previously.

“Where are we going?” Suzie shouted, but Noble had no answers. Nor, it seemed, did the Lieutenant. It all became moot seconds later. Noble looked up and saw two hulking black shapes block the road ahead. The squad turned back. Three more Shoggoths
blocked their retreat.

“Looks like they’ve woken up. We’re a threat now, right enough,” Noble said.

The Lieutenant wasn’t listening. He was making a visual sweep of the area.

“Over here,” he shouted. “Follow me.”

He led them to a squat structure to their left, one that had a small opening, big enough for the squad to pass through, and too small for any of the beasts to enter. The Lieutenant herded them all inside and put a man with an acid tank at the door. The Shoggoths slumped forward, but stopped in front of the structure’s entrance, showing no sign of any attack, no will to come any closer.

But it doesn’t look like they’re going to let us go anywhere soon.

The Lieutenant was in no mood to be caught in a trap. “Enough of this,” he said. “Let’s hit them and see what they’ve got. I won’t die hiding in a hole.”

Noble felt a
tickle
in his mind and immediately knew what it was and where it was coming from.

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said. He pointed at the far wall. “Can we go through there?”

It turned out they could. It took a wash of acid and it sent out fumes that nearly choked them. But minutes later, they had made a hole in the wall. It opened out into a larger open area beyond, a long cavernous space that stretched away from them into the darkness. Noble, Suzie, and the Lieutenant hung back as the eight marines went through, but Noble already knew that it was safe.

It wants us to come. It’s waiting for us.

He didn
’
t know
how
he knew, he just knew. Just as he knew exactly which direction to head for.

The city seemed to have been built purely to accommodate this high vaulting space. They walked through it in silence, each of them unwilling to break the almost church-like silence. Dim light, multi-coloured and always shifting, came through from high above, as if filtered through stained glass. It only further reinforced the almost religious nature of the space.

Noble
’
s eyes adjusted to the light, enough that he started to see that the space was not empty. The Shoggoths had built more than just buildings. Tall shapes littered the
floor
nearby, shapes that looked like sculpture, but not of anything of this world. One shape above all dominated the space, a stocky barrel with a five-pointed appendage on top. There were hundreds of them, all in various stages of development. Some had what looked like wings attached, long wide expanses of gossamer thin plastic that seemed to move in the shifting light.

But somehow the statues didn’t seem worthy of too much attention. All Noble wanted to do was keep walking, heading in a straight line for some unknown destination. He felt dissociated from reality; strangely calm, while at the same time, screaming silently inside.

We’re walking into a trap.

He knew it and he suspected his companions knew it, but they all walked, eyes staring flatly ahead, heading for a point in the darkness at the far end of the space they had entered.

He was brought back to reality by a pain in his hand. Suzie had him in a grip so tight that he thought his fingers might break.

“Fight it,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “We must fight it.”

He found he was able to look around. They had walked further than he had thought.

Much further.

The entrance by which they’d come in to this chamber was lost in a dim distance. Light still filtered in from high overhead, but it was dimmer now than before.

The sun is going down.

The young Lieutenant walked just beyond Suzie. His jaw was set in a grimace and sweat ran down his forehead, but he did not seem able to stop walking.

Help me
!

Noble tried to deviate from his path, to move towards the officer, but he found that, although he was able to move his head from side to side, that was
all
he was able to do. The compulsion that held sway in his mind had control and led him, and the others, onwards into the growing darkness.

It soon became apparent where they were going. At first, it looked like just another darker shadow, but as they approached, the rusted hull of a cargo ship loomed over them. It sat half-embedded in a thick sheet of rough plastic, looking as if it were afloat on a quiet, dark sea. But it was obvious that this vessel had not been seaworthy for a while—a hole in the keel wide enough to allow a truck to pass through attested to that. The hole was darker still than the surrounding chamber and Noble felt a chill seep into him as they were
led
inside.

He expected it to be fully dark as they made the transition to an interior space, but if anything, it was slightly lighter inside.

They walked into what had obviously been a cargo hold and suddenly, Noble remembered the words from more than half a century before.

I worry about breakages
.

It was immediately apparent that the Shoggoths had built more than just the city around them. The hold was a cavern of ever-moving light, a luminescence that seemed to come from a spot in the centre of the space.

As they got closer, Noble started to make out details. It looked like nothing less than a
blob
of protoplasm, an amoeba grown to monstrous size. But as they approached, they could see that this was no natural construct. Its skin, if you could call it such, was a thin translucent sheet of polythene, ever shifting as the fluid contents inside flowed and swam. Deep inside, almost invisible in the viscous fluid, there was a darker spot the size of a football.

And that’s what has hold of us
.

They were brought to a halt only six feet from the thing’s perimeter—all but one of them. One of the marines kept walking, straight at the thing. It surged and enveloped him in folds of plastic. He immediately started to
melt.
His face took on a contorted, pained expression, but no more than it would if he’d had a toothache. Even as his flesh sloughed off he kept walking forward. It all took place in complete silence and none of the marine’s companions moved to help him. Suzie’s grip on Noble’s hand tightened, but that was the only sign of anything amiss.

They all stood watching as the young marine was assimilated, broken down into first meat and bone, then further digested, until all that remained to show he’d been there was a scrap of khaki cloth and a pink stain in the fluid matrix. His weapon seemed to hang for a while in the fluid before sinking slowly towards the ground.

The last hint of pink slowly faded. In the far distance, the now-familiar chant went up again.

Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.

Noble felt Suzie’s grip loosen on his hand.