Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

‘What about these lines?’ Tommy asked, indicating the three dock ties that she had not cast off.

‘Forward spring, after spring, and breast line. I’ll take care of them. You just get in position on the bow.’

He shoved the Desert Eagle under the waistband of his jeans, praying to God he wouldn’t stumble and fall and accidentally blow off his manhood. Draping Del’s jacket over the shotgun in his left hand, he grabbed the railing with his right hand, and pulled himself aboard.

As he started forward, another worry occurred to him, and he turned to Del. ‘Hey, don’t you need keys or something to start it?’

‘No.’

‘For God’s sake, it can’t be like an outboard motor with a pull cord.’

‘I have my ways,’ she assured him.

In spite of the deep gloom, he could see that her smile was even more enigmatic than any with which she had previously favoured him.

She leaned toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and then said, ‘Hurry.’

He went forward to the open bow deck. At the foremost point of the yacht, he stepped into the slightly depressed well in which was mounted the anchor winch. He dropped the jacket, which wasn’t going anywhere because it weighed about ten pounds with all the ammo in its pockets.

With a sigh of relief at not having been neutered, he gingerly withdrew the pistol from his waistband and placed it on top of the jacket, where he could easily get hold of it if the need arose.

The rain-swept docks were still deserted.

A halyard rattled mutedly against a mast on a sailboat. Dock rollers creaked and rasped over concrete pilings, and jammed rubber fenders squeaked between a boat hull and a dock.

The water was oil-black and had a faint briny smell. In the detective novels he wrote, this was the cold, murky, secret-keeping water into which villains some-times dropped chain-wrapped victims in concrete boots. In other writers’ books, such water was home to great white sharks, giant killer squid, and sea serpents.

He looked back at the dark windows of the enclosed lower deck, immediately behind him, wondering where Del had gone.

The smaller top deck began farther aft, and as he raised his gaze to it, soft amber light appeared at the windshield of what might be an upper helm station. Then he glimpsed Del as she slipped behind the wheel and looked over the instrumentation.

When Tommy checked the docks again, nothing moved on them, although he wouldn’t have been surprised to see policemen, harbour policemen, Coast Guardsmen, FBI agents, and so many other officers of one law-enforcement agency or another that the Samaritan-thing, if it showed up, would be unable to shoulder its way through the crowd. He had probably broken more laws tonight than in his entire previous thirty years combined.

The Bluewater’s twin diesel engines chugged, coughed, and then turned over with a hard rumble of power. The foredeck vibrated under Tommy’s shoes.

He looked toward the top-deck helm again and saw, beside Del, Scootie’s head, ears pricked. The Labrador was apparently standing with his forepaws on the instru-ment board, and Del was patting his big head as if to say, Good dog.

For some reason he couldn’t grasp, Tommy was reminded of the swarming birds. He flashed back, as well, to the courtyard of Del’s house, when they had entered from the street with the Samaritan in pursuit of them, and the previously locked front door had seemed to be open before she could have reached it. Abruptly he felt poised on the brink of a satori again, but then the moment passed without bringing him enlightenment.

This time, when he turned his attention to the docks, he saw the Samaritan-thing hurtling through the gate at the sea wall, no more than two hundred feet away, raincoat billowing like a cape behind it, no longer dazzled by birds, its eyes on the prize.

‘Go, go!’ Tommy urged Del as the yacht began to ease backward out of its slip.

The demon descended to the dock head and raced westward along the base of the sea wall, passing all of the boats that Del had rejected.

Standing in the anchor well, Tommy held the Mossberg in both hands, hoping the creature would never get close enough to require the use of the shotgun.

The yacht was halfway out of the slip and moving faster by the second.

Tommy heard the thudding of his own heart, and then he heard an even louder pounding: the hollow booming of the demon’s footfalls on the dock planks.

The yacht was three-quarters of the way out of the slip, and waves of black water rolled in where it had been, slapping the dock.

Skidding on the wet planks, the fat-man-that-wasn’t-a-fat-man reached the head of the slip and sprinted onto the port-side finger, desperately trying to catch them before they reversed all the way into the channel.

The beast was close enough for Tommy to see its radiant green eyes in the pale face of the Samaritan, as improbable and frightening in the countenance of the fat man as in that of the rag doll.

The Bluewater reversed all the way out of the slip, churning hard through water now festooned with gar-lands of phosphorescent foam.

The demon sprinted to the end of the port-side finger of the slip just as the yacht pulled away. It didn’t stop, but leaped across the six-foot gap between the end of the dock and the boat, slammed into the pulpit only three feet in front of Tommy, and seized the railing with both hands.

As the thing tried to pull itself over the railing and aboard, Tommy squeezed off a round from the shotgun, point-blank in its face, flinching at the roar and at the gout of flame that spurted from the muzzle of the Mossberg.

In the pearlescent glow of the running lights, he saw the fat man’s face vanish in the blast, and he gagged in revulsion at the grisly spectacle.

But the Samaritan-thing didn’t let go of the pulpit railing. It should have been torn loose by the powerful hit that it had taken, but the relentless beast still hung from the bow and continued trying to drag-heave-roll itself onto the foredeck.

Out of the raw, oozing mass of torn flesh left by the shotgun blast, the fat man’s glistening white face at once miraculously re-formed, utterly undamaged, and the green serpent eyes blinked open, radiant and fierce.

The thick-lipped mouth yawned wide, gaping silently for a moment, and then the Samaritan-thing screamed at Tommy. The piercing voice was not remotely human, less like an animal sound than like an electronic shriek.

Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breech, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.

The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature’s grip.

Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger,

pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.

Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.

Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.

The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn’t drop the weapon when he landed.

Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it wasn’t a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.