Tim Curran - Dead Sea

“Fifty’s soon enough,” Marx said behind them, balancing his hatchet-hammer on one muscular shoulder. “Christ, I was married six frigging times. Six. And all of ‘em meat-eaters and ball-collectors. Don’t be in no hurry, Cushing, to lacquer your balls and put ‘em in a glass case with a DO NOT FUCKING DISTURB sign on ‘em. You get married, only time she’ll let you see your balls is when it’s time to dust ‘em off. Oh, I speak from experience. My last wife, Lucinda… holy Jesus Christ, you had to see this one. She could de-nut the best. Even when we divorced, evil bitch only gave me one of ‘em back. I think she ate the other. She was special, that Lucinda. A week with her was like ten years hardtime. Her mouth was so big you could’ve slapped a sewer cover on it. Yeah, she was some kind of ball-buster, all right. Girl like that made a man want to suck dick and hang curtains and walk funny. Just the sight of her made my pecker go soft and my wrists get limp.”

“So why the hell did you marry her?” Gosling asked.

Marx winked at him. “Oh, because I loved her, First. Loved her dearly.”

The talk moved on to Marx’s other wives, all of whom sounded like growling, long-toothed things that had slipped out of the House of Carnivores at the zoo. Marx said his second wife was so pissing mean, he used to wear body armor to bed and carry a whip and a chair to tea.

“You want to know what it is for me, George?” Cushing said, now that Marx was on to the snakepit of his third marriage. “What keeps me going? Curiosity.”

“Curiosity?”

Cushing nodded. “That and nothing more. I don’t really have much back home, unless you want to count my golddigging sister who married Franklin Fisk who got us all into this mess. But what I do have is curiosity, see? For natural history and biology and living things. I like folklore and general history, philosophy and literature. A lot of highbrow crap like that. And this place? Shit, it’s awful, but I’m seeing things few men have ever seen. Ever lived to tell about. All those ships out there… you know what they are? Mysteries. The kind of things people write about and make movies and documentaries about. Things people will never really explain, all those vanished ships and planes. But we have the answers to all those riddles. We know what happened and I think that’s kind of a gift, don’t you?”

George didn’t think that at all, but he nodded. “We’ll die smart, anyway.”

He was listening to Marx extol the virtues of his fourth wife who apparently was some kind of cannibal who sharpened her teeth with a file and had razor blades shoved up her wahoo.

Cushing cocked his head to the side. “You hear that?”

George thought he had heard something, too. He just wasn’t sure what. But now he was hearing it again: a stealthy, sliding sound. It came and then went. “What is it?” Gosling said to them.

But neither of them could say and now Marx had fallen silent, too. The night was pressing down, misty and moist and clotted. The cargo bay of the C-130 made everything echo. They could hear water dripping and Chesbro mumbling prayers. Then… then something else. That sliding sound again. To George, it sounded oddly like somebody was dragging ropes over the outer shell of the cargo bay. But he wasn’t thinking ropes. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Only that to him, it was not a harmless sound, but an evil sound full of menace and danger.

Marx had joined them now. “What in the Christ?” he said.

And then, just beyond the lip of the loading ramp, the sea suddenly lit up with a grim and ghostly phosphorescence that spread out for what seemed hundreds of feet. It lit up the fog and made the weeds go luminous. Just some eerie incandescence coming from beneath the water and weeds themselves.

And then it faded and the darkness swam back in.

“Get away from that door,” Gosling said.

They could hear that stealthy rustling again, something – many of them, in fact – brushing against the outside of the cargo bay.

George and Cushing backed away, but Marx was not moving.

Gosling dropped his crowbar, came around the side of the Hummer in front. It was facing outward and he clicked on its headlights, two pillars of light stabbing through the darkness and fog. But there was nothing out there, nothing at all. Just the fog swirling about, the glistening expanse of weeds.

Then there was a splashing sound like something heavy had fallen back into the sea followed by a squeaking sound like a finger drawn over glass.

But what had caused it, no one could say.

They were all watching the fog out there in the Hummer’s headlights. It was thick and boiling and damp. There was another of those rustling sounds and then a tentacle came sliding out of the mist. It emerged with a sort of scraping, scuttling sound like some fleshy, blind caterpillar looking for a juicy leaf. It crept up the boarding ramp, looking almost curious. A slimy and undulating thing about the width of a pencil at the tip and bigger around than a man’s waist where it disappeared into the weedy depths. It was bright red with pebbly flesh and obscenely bloated, stout and powerful and flexing with muscle.

It carried a sharp, gagging stink of ammonia about it.

“Jesus lovely Christ,” Gosling said.

Marx was stepping back now, too.

The tentacle had not come up into the cargo bay as yet, it was busy searching around on the ramp itself like an investigative worm, like it knew something appealing was there… or had been.

Sure, George found himself thinking, us.

It coiled about on the boarding ramp, fat and full. Its beaded red flesh was the color of boiled lobsters and beneath, they saw, were triple rows of dun yellow suckers, puckering and expanding, a brown chitinous hook like a cat’s claw emerging from each one. These are what made the scraping sounds.

“Squid,” Marx said. “Big, shitting squid. Saw this big mother floating off the Canaries once, it-”

But he never finished that, for the tentacle shuddered and froze-up like maybe it had heard him, it twisted up upon itself, exposing those puckering suckers and hooks, and then slid back off into the fog. And you could almost feel the relief spread through the men, but it was short-lived. Very short-lived.

Two more tentacles came out of the mist. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth. They came out fast, sliding up the boarding ramp like blood-red pythons searching for something to constrict. Marx barely got out of their way and he didn’t get out of the way of the sixth and seventh. They darted out of the mist like rattlesnakes striking, one corkscrewing around his waist and the other looping around his left arm.

It happened just that fast.

So fast, in fact, that everyone managed to gasp and that was about it. Those tentacles found him like they knew exactly where he was, like they could see him. There was no hesitation. They came out of the fog and wrapped him up and with such force, all Marx had time to do was utter a low grunting, ummfff as if he had been kicked in the stomach, the wind knocked right out of him. The hatchet-hammer fell from his fingers about the same time and clattered to floor of the cargo bay.

“Oh my God,” Gosling said, simply surprised.

Those tentacles twined him up like a fireman’s hose, tightening and squeezing and Marx screamed, a high and shrieking sound of primal agony. And then like a vise, those vibrant red tentacles crushed him with immense strength. You could actually see their alien musculature flex and contract like a clenching hand. Marx’s eyes bulged and his face went a vibrant red, just as red as those tentacles, then purple and finally black. The tentacle around his waist had squeezed his midsection to the thickness of a forearm and you could hear bones snapping and things pulping to sauce inside him. He looked like a livid water balloon a child had squeezed in its fist… his torso and head, legs and hips swelled-up to the point of bursting from internal hydrostatic pressure. He gagged out foam and blood in snotty tangles and something bleeding and fleshy which might have been his stomach or intestines.