Tim Curran - Dead Sea

“Look,” George said. “Jesus Christ, look…”

The weeds and mist were glowing again, which meant the squid was still there, still waiting. There was a gentle, rolling splash and a tentacle slid out of the sea and up the loading ramp, uncurling as it came on. It was one of the specialized tentacles with the convex, hooded club at the end. The club was very smooth and shiny, reflecting the glare of the battery lamp hanging above. Cushing figured it was six or seven feet at its widest point and probably nearer twenty feet in length than sixteen as he’d originally thought. The tentacle it was hooked to, was smooth and suckerless, big around as a centuried oak where it vanished in the weeds.

George made an involuntary gagging sound. “What the fuck is that?” he said.

But Cushing was beyond words.

The club rose up vertically as before at the edge of the cargo bay, revealing its pink, moist underside and the barbed spines gleaming at its perimeter. That pink flesh shriveled back from that immense concave mouth and black gnashing teeth. They all saw that circle of red orbs and were all certain they were watching eyes. Pink slime was dripping from the mouth, dropping in clots to the ramp.

“Don’t move,” Cushing told them, locked down hard inside like January ice.

Nobody did.

They just stood there, peering around the Hummer.

It was an insane, nightmarish scenario. The club moved up into the cargo bay inch by terrible inch. Once inside, the tentacle itself paused, but the club turned slightly to the left and then to the right like the head of a man looking or listening for something. Cushing had a sudden, unsettling memory of watching the movie, War of the Worlds, as a boy. That part where the couple are trapped in the farmhouse with the Martian war machine hovering outside and the sensory probe that looked like a Martian head came sliding in through the shattered window, trying to locate them. This was very much like that, for he had no doubt whatsoever that this club was looking for them.

No, no, not looking, but sensing, it occurred to him. It can’t see. Those things look like eyes, but they’re not eyes, not really. More like the eyespots around the bell of a jellyfish… looking very much like eyes, but actually light-sensing ocelli. Except in this case, maybe not light-sensing at all, but possibly heat-sensing like the pit organ of a desert rattlesnake.

It was sheer speculation on his part, a wild leap of logic at best based on what he understood of sensory physiology, but it sounded about right.

Yet, it was hard not to believe those orbs weren’t eyes. When that hooded club swept around, they glittered like jewels, like something with awareness and intelligence behind them.

Cushing was wondering if maybe that monstrous cephalopod and its attendant tentacles might just leave, figuring the food source in the plane had made its escape. But he would never know because Pollard was getting antsy. He was shaking like a man with a tropical fever, sweat rolling down his face in rivers.

“I can’t do this,” he said under his breath. “I can’t do this.. .”

And then he moved, turned and ran back towards the cockpit. The club jerked back suddenly like a startled cobra and that mouth hissed in alarm. It had sensed Pollard’s whereabouts now, whether through motion or heat or maybe both. And the sea beyond the ramp began to boil and the mist began to blow around as dozens of tentacles came pouring out of the weeds and up the ramp, coiling and looping like serpents from a snake charmer’s basket.

George and Cushing ran back to join the others.

Ran back and looked at those sweating faces and shocked, glassy eyes that were expecting to hear what their plan was. Hear about their defense or escape route, except George and Cushing didn’t have one. Because this was it. This was endgame.

The beast knew where they were and now it was coming for them.

George saw the first of the tentacles slide over the roof of the Hummer, three more slide under it and emerge with a swimming, serpentine side-to-side motion.

“Into the cockpit,” Cushing said. “Right now.”

George and Pollard lifted up Gosling and started carrying him through the door.

Chesbro was just pale and paralyzed.

“Move, goddamn you!” Cushing said, the stink of the beast bathing them. When Chesbro didn’t, he slapped him across the face. “Now, you dumb shit, unless you want your Behemoth to find you.”

That got Chesbro moving.

He leaped through the cockpit door and Cushing wondered, as the tentacles came worming and slithering forward, wondered how long that flimsy steel door was going to protect them.

And maybe he would have kept wondering it except he saw an eruption of light outside, from somewhere in the mist. A flickering, orange-yellow light like that of a bonfire. Whatever it was, the tentacles and their master became aware of it, too. They froze on the floor, in midair, hanging from the ceiling by their suckers. They began to quiver like a cat watching a bird. More of that flickering light and very close now.

Fire.

It was fire.

Out here… but how?

A tongue of flame brushed up against the plane, throwing a greasy, churning light that jumped and flashed. Gosling, looking down towards the passenger door saw the flames quite clearly. The weeds were on fire. And either they had ignited themselves or someone had done it for them.

“What the hell is it?” someone in the cockpit said.

And Cushing was wondering just that when a shadow cut through the flames outside the passenger door. A shadow hunched and jumped through the doorway. Cushing fell backward through the cockpit hatch, expecting the very worst.

But what he saw was a human being.

A human being with a pail of something in one hand and a burning flare in the other. They tossed the bucket at the tentacles and threw the flare. Flames erupted in a gushing, spreading cloud and the tentacles retreated instantly like worms on a hotplate. They disappeared in a column of funneling smoke.

And it was then that Cushing got a look at their savior.

It was a woman.

They saw it.

They all saw it, if only for a moment or two. Something sticking up out of the weed. Something circular, disc-shaped, and very large. It wasn’t a boat and it wasn’t a plane… at least not of the world they came from. There was a word for what it might have been, but nobody dared say it out loud. They saw it for just a few fleeting seconds, then it was lost again in the fog. Thankfully.

“What do you think it was, Fabrini?”

Saks said this to him, not really expecting a reply anymore than he would expect one from a pet beagle. Because he figured that, intellectually, Fabrini was on the same level as your common ball-licking, shit-on-the-carpet, drink-from-the-fucking-toilet beagle. On a good day, that was. Most days, you could play fetch-the-goddamn-stick all afternoon with that boy and he still wouldn’t get it. Sit there, wagging his tail and waiting for you to tell him what he should be doing and what he should be thinking about it all.

At least, this is how Saks was seeing things.

His crew of misfits and ass-fuckers, as he liked to call them, were his pets now that Cook was in hairball-heaven. Old Al Saks was holding that leash and you got out of line, he’d whack you in the nose with a rolled-up Chicago Trib or rub your pink, wet little nose in your own shit, see if he didn’t.

Fabrini kept swallowing, looking around in the mist for a door that said EXIT and not finding one. “I don’t know, I don’t know what it was.”

“You hear that, Menhaus? He don’t know what it was. Fagbrini, you’re a goddamn moron, you know that?”

Ah, here we go.