Beast (33 page)

“My God,” Sharp said. “Is that an eye?”

Talley nodded.

“What kind of size?” asked Darling.

“I can’t tell,” Talley said. “There’s nothing to measure it against. But if the focal length of the camera was about six feet, and the eye fills the whole frame, it has to be … like so.” He held his hands two feet apart. For a moment he gazed at his hands, as if unable to believe the size of the span he had created. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “The thing must be ninety feet, perhaps more.” He looked up at Darling. “This could be a hundred-foot animal.”

“When we get home,” Darling said, “we’re all gonna get down on our knees and give thanks that we never got any closer to that fucker.” Then he turned away and climbed the two steps up into the wheelhouse.

Dawn was breaking. The sky in the east had lightened to a grayish blue, and the advancing sun cast a line of pink on the horizon.

Darling pushed the starter button, and waited to hear the warning bell from the engine room and the rumbling cough as the engine came to life.

But all he heard was a click, then nothing.

He pushed it again. This time, nothing at all. He swore to himself several times, and then whacked the wheel with the heel of his hand, for as soon as he knew that the engine wouldn’t start, he knew why it wouldn’t start. There was no generator noise: The silence told him that sometime during the night, the generator had run out of fuel. The batteries had taken over automatically, but eventually, after being drained for hours by the lights and the refrigerator and the fathometer and the fish-finder, they had run down. They were still putting out some power, but they couldn’t muster the juice to fire up the big diesel engine.

After he had calmed down, he considered which of the two fully charged compressor batteries would be easiest to shift over to the main engine, selected one, and reviewed in his mind the procedure for removing it from its mounts and sliding it through the tangle of machinery in the engine room and mounting it beside the engine.

It was nasty work, but not the end of the world.

As he crossed the wheelhouse on his way down to the engine room, it occurred to him that he should turn off the instruments, to save power. All the kick in the new battery should be directed to igniting the engine. He turned the knob on the fathometer, and the stylus stopped moving. The switch on the fish-finder was farther away. As he reached for it, his eyes glanced at the screen.

It wasn’t blank anymore. For a moment, he thought: Good, life is coming back. Then he looked closer, and he realized that he had never seen an image like this on the screen. There weren’t the little dots that signaled scattered fish, or the smears that showed schools of larger animals. The image on the screen was a single, solid mass, a mass of something alive. Something rising toward the surface, and rising fast.

THE BEAST SHOT upward through the sea like a torpedo. An observer might have thought that it was in retreat, for it moved backward, but it was not retreating. Nature had designed it to move backward with great speed and efficiency. It was attacking, and its triangular tail was like an arrow point, guiding it to its target.

It was over a hundred feet long from the clubs on its whips to the tip of its tail, and it weighed a dozen tons. But it had no concept of its size, or of the fact that it was supreme in the sea.

Its whips were retracted now, its tentacles clustered together like a trailing tail, for it was streamlined for speed.

Its chemistry was agitated, and its colors had changed many times, as its senses struggled to decipher conflicting messages. First there had been the irresistible impulse to breed; then perplexity when it had tried to mate and been unable to; then confusion when the alien thing had continued to emit breeding spoor; then anxiety as it had tried to shed the thing and found it could not, for the thing had attached itself like a parasite; then rage as it had perceived a threat from the thing and proceeded, with its tentacles and its beak, to destroy the threatener.

Now, what remained was rage, and it was rage of a new dimension. The beast’s color was a deep, viscous red.

Before, the giant squid had always responded to impulses of rage with instantaneous explosive spasms of destruction, which had consumed the rage. But this time the rage did not abate; it evolved. And now it had a purpose, a goal.

And so the hunter rose, driven to cause not only destruction but death.

A THOUSAND FEET, Darling guessed as he calibrated the fish-finder. The thing was at a thousand feet, and it was coming up like a bullet. They had five minutes, no more, probably less.

He jumped down into the cabin. “Get the boat hook, Marcus,” he said. “And make sure that detonator’s ready to fire.”

“What’s wrong?” Talley asked.

“The bastard’s coming up at us again,” said Darling, “and my bloody battery’s dead.” He disappeared down into the engine room.

Sharp climbed up to the flying bridge, lifted the boat hook and examined the bomb. The paste of glycerine and gasoline had hardened, but it was still moist, and he smeared it evenly over the top of the explosive. Then he pressed the little glass bottle deeper into the paste, so it couldn’t fall out even if the end of the boat hook was waved around.

The device was simple; there was no reason it shouldn’t work. As soon as air got to the phosphorous, it would ignite and start an instantaneous chain reaction, setting off the Semtex. All they had to do was make sure that the beast bit down on the bottle, or crushed it in one of its whips.

All they had to do was feed an explosive to a hundred-foot monster, and jump out of the way before they were blown to tatters.

That was all.

Sharp suddenly felt sick. He looked out over the calm sea, dappled by the rising sun. Everything was peaceful. How did Whip know the creature was coming up? How could he be sure? Maybe what he had seen on the screen was a whale.

Stop it, he told himself. Stop fantasizing and get ready.

It would work. It had to.

Darling crawled across the engine room and pushed the heavy twelve-volt battery in front of him. His knuckles were bloody and his legs cramped. When he judged that the battery was close enough for the cables to reach it, he unbolted them from the dead battery, without bothering to remove the dead battery from its mounts. He didn’t care if the fresh battery tore itself loose and tumbled around; once he got it to kick over the engine, he wouldn’t need it.

He paused long enough to be sure he was attaching the cables to the proper poles—positive to positive, negative to negative—and bolted it down.

Then he got to his feet and raced up the ladder.

ITS PREY WAS directly above.

It could see it with its eyes, could feel it with the sensors in its body. It did not pause to analyze the quarry, did not seek signs of life or scent of food.

But because the prey was alien, instinct told the creature to be wary, to appraise it first. And so, as a shark circles unknown objects in the sea, as a whale emits sonar impulses and deciphers the returns, Architeuthis dux passed once beneath the quarry and scanned it with its eyes. The force of its passage cast a pressure wave upward.

Then suddenly the prey above it erupted with noise, and began to move.

The beast interpreted the noise and movement as signs of flight. Quickly, it rotated the funnel in its belly, turned in its own length and attacked.

WHEN DARLING HAD felt the boat surge beneath him, he had held his breath and pushed the button, and then, a second later, had heard the rumble of the big diesel. He didn’t wait for the engine to warm up—he rammed the throttle forward and leaned on it.

At first, the boat leaped forward, and then suddenly it stopped short, as if it were anchored by the stern. It tipped backward; the bow rose, and Darling was thrown back against the bulkhead. Then the boat fell forward again, and nosed into the sea. But still it didn’t move.

The pitch of the engine had changed from a roar to a complaining whine. Then it began to sputter. It coughed twice, then died, and the boat lay dead in the water.

Sweet Jesus, Darling thought—the beast has wrecked the propeller, either jammed it or bent it up against the shaft. He felt suddenly cold.

He dropped down into the cabin and went out through the door onto the afterdeck.

Talley was standing by the midships hatch, staring numbly at the sea. When he saw Darling, he said, “Where is he? I thought you said—”

“Right underneath us,” Darling said. “He’s screwed us good and proper.” He went to the stern and looked down over the transom into the water. A few feet beneath the swim step, snaking out from beneath the boat, was the tip of a tentacle.

Standing beside Darling, Talley said, “He must have tried to grab the propeller.”

“Now he’s lost an arm,” said Darling, “maybe that’ll discourage him.”

“It won’t,” Talley said. “All it will do is enrage him.”

Darling looked up at the flying bridge and saw Sharp standing at the railing, holding Manning’s rifle. As he started up the ladder, he heard Talley say, “Captain …”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” Talley said. “This was all my—”

“Forget it. Sorry’s a waste of time, and we don’t have much time. Put on a life jacket.”

“Are we sinking?”

“Not yet,” Darling said.

The boat hook stood vertically in a rod holder, and Darling removed it and felt its heft.

“I’ll do it,” Sharp said, gesturing at the bomb on the end of the boat hook.

“No, Marcus,” said Darling, and he tried to smile. “Captain’s prerogative.”

They both looked out over the water then, and as they watched, the sun cleared the horizon and faded from orange to gold, and the color of the sea changed from dead gray to steel blue.

The beast writhed in the darkness, berserk with pain and confusion. Green fluid seeped from the stump of its missing tentacle.

It was not disabled—it sensed no loss of power. It knew only that what it had perceived as prey was more than prey. It was an enemy.

The creature rose again toward the surface.

*

Darling and Sharp were gazing off the bow, when suddenly from behind them came Talley’s voice, screaming, “No!”

They whirled around and looked at the stern, and they froze.

Something was coming over the bulwark. For a moment it seemed to ooze like a giant purple slug. Then the front of it curled back like a lip, and it began to rise and fan out until it was four feet across and eight feet high, and it blocked the rays of the sun. It was covered with quivering circles, like hungry mouths, and in each one Darling could see a shining amber blade.

“Shoot it, Marcus!” Darling shouted. “Shoot!”

But Sharp stood agape, mesmerized, the rifle useless in his hands. Then, below them, Talley heard something, and he turned to his left, and screamed. Amidships, slithering aboard, was the beast’s other whip.

The scream startled Sharp, and he spun and fired three shots. One went high; one struck the bulkhead and ricocheted away; the third hit the club of the whip dead center. The flesh did not react, did not bleed, twitch or recoil. It seemed to swallow the bullet.

More and more of both whips came aboard, writhing like snakes and falling in heaps of purple flesh, each atom of which moved and pulsed and quivered as if it had a goal of its own. They seemed to sense life aboard, and movement, for the clubs bent forward and began to move ahead on their circles, like searching spiders.

Talley seemed paralyzed. He did not flinch, made no move to flee, but stood still, frozen.

“Doc!” Darling shouted. “Get the hell out of there!”

When both whips were heaped in the stern, they stopped moving for a moment, as if the creature were hesitating, and then suddenly both whips expanded with muscle tension, and the stern was pressed downward. Behind the boat, the ocean seemed to rise up, as if giving birth to a mountain. There was a sucking sound, and a roar.

“Jesus Christ!” Darling yelled. “It’s coming aboard!” He backed away, holding the boat hook at shoulder level, like a lance.

They saw the tentacles first, seven thrashing arms that grasped the stern and, like an athlete hoisting himself onto a parallel bar, pushed downward to bring the body up.

Then they saw an eye, whitish yellow and impossibly huge, like a moon rising beneath the sun. In its center was a globe of fathomless black.

The stern was forced downward until it was awash. Water poured aboard and ran forward, flooding into the after hatches.

It’s gonna do it, Darling thought. The bastard’s gonna sink us. And then pick us off one by one.

The other eye came up now, and as the creature turned its head and faced them, the eyes seemed to fix on them. Between the eyes the arms quivered and roiled, and at the juncture of the arms, like a bull’s-eye on a target, the two-foot beak, sharp and protuberant, snapped reflexively, looking to be fed. The sound was of a forest falling in a storm, like great trunks cracking in a roaring wind.

Talley suddenly came to. He turned and ran to the bottom of the ladder and began to climb. He was halfway to the flying bridge when the creature saw him.

One of the whips recoiled, rose in the air and sprang forward, reaching for him. Talley saw it coming, and as he tried to dodge it, his feet skidded off the ladder, and he hung by his hands from one of the rungs. The whip coiled around the ladder, tore it away from the bulkhead and held it suspended over the flying bridge, with Talley dangling from it like a marionette.

“Drop, Doc!” Darling shouted, as the other whip hissed overhead and slashed at Talley.

Talley let go, and fell, his feet struck the outboard lip of the flying bridge, and for a second he teetered there, his arms cartwheeling as he groped for the railing. His eyes were wide, and his mouth hung open. Then, almost in slow motion, he toppled backward into the sea. The whip crushed the ladder and cast it away.

Sharp fired the rifle at the beast until the clip was empty. Tracer bullets streaked into the oozing flesh and vanished.