again. Something struck the keel with force and the boat rocked, then rocked again. There were shouts and cries from the other two boats now. Either they were hitting something or something was hitting them. Oates badly wanted to cut the order to open those craft up, but that alley was too tight. Last thing he needed was for one of the Zodiacs to strike something and flip over. These goddamn idiots probably couldn’t even swim.
“Settle down back there, ladies!” Oates called out. “This water is full of junk, nothing more!”
Then the boat lurched again. Lurched and stopped dead like they’d snagged on something. The other boats bumped into it and then they were all stopped. The lead boat twisted to the left like it was going to flip, then it spun lazily in a half-circle like something down there was holding it…then it drifted free four or five feet, then it stopped dead again.
The silence was heavy and brooding, even with the rain dropping into the water and popping against the rubber boats, splatting against vinyl ponchos.
“Fuck is this?” Jones called from the boat behind.
Then something slammed into his boat and it was actually lifted inches out of the water and dropped back with a splash. Strickland and Chernick cried out as they were tossed from their seats to the muddy floorboards.
“Something hit us!” Jones cried out. “There’s something under us! There’s something down there!”
Then, on the bottom of all the boats, slapping and pounding sounds. And along the keel of the lead craft, a muted scratching like something sharp drawn along its length.
The men were panicking, searchlights and flashlights scanning the water and the walls of the buildings, those abandoned docks. The rain fell in a fine spray and there was movement in the water around them. Things breaking the surface and disappearing, bobbing and sinking. Shadows slithering and the stink of mortuaries.
Oates saw a face just above the water.
Only for the briefest of moments, but he put his flashlight full on it and there was no denying the grim reality of it. A face bleached-white and puckered, chewed-looking as if fish had been nibbling on it, strips of flesh hanging from the cheeks and forehead like Spanish moss. Then it slid down beneath the waters again.
“What the hell was that?” Hinks said.
And Oates was going to tell him it was nothing, just a fucking doll’s head or something, but he couldn’t seem to find the words to speak. His tongue felt numb in his mouth. But his brain was thinking: Like a shark, a goddamn shark. That thing showed itself like a shark shows its dorsal fin before it attacks. And when the dorsal goes under…
“There’s things in the water,” Hopper called out. “I saw ‘em…like faces in the water, all around us.”
And right then you could almost feel the terror and the adrenaline pumping into each man. Weapons were brought up and bodies tensed. They could feel attack coming, just not from which direction. And Oates knew it, felt it, lived it, as he’d done so many times before. This was how it felt right before the enemy stormed down on your position: the terror, the juice in your veins, that pervasive sense of the calm before the storm as bodies went rigid and breath was held and nerves crackled with electricity.
“Listen to me now,” Oates said and they all heard him. “I want those safeties off those weapons right now. Anything that shows itself is to be considered unfriendly. Drivers, let’s get these boats moving right goddamn now! Hup to it, Mary Lou or there’s gonna be very little loving and a whole lot of raping…”
They were close.
They almost made it.
If they’d gotten out of there a minute sooner, maybe, maybe. But the water suddenly slapped violently around them and exploded. A white, shrunken arm shot out and snatched Chernick by the wrist and then everyone was shouting and screaming. Weapons were discharged at ghosts and the searchlights cast grotesque shadows everywhere.
Chernick was a big boy who worked the weights every day. He’d been a linebacker in high school and he’d been a golden gloves boxer, so he did not go down without a fight. As that white, slimy arm tried to yank him over the side he pulled away and brought it right up into the boat with him.
It…and what it was attached to.
And when he saw it, when he looked that thing right in the face, he started screaming like an infant, thrashing and squealing. He lost his 16, began punching and clawing at that ragged thing he’d fished up from the water. His nails shredded the waterlogged flesh right down to the bone, but the skeletal hand clung on tenaciously, the fingertips sinking right into his wrist. He flopped and wailed, knocking Jones into the drink just as another white arm looped around Strickland’s throat like an especially soft and blubbery tentacle and he was drawn over the side, a mutiny of clawing hands waiting for him.
Oates thought maybe he screamed himself as he saw what Chernick was fighting with, the searchlight spinning on its base and strobing the scene with flashes of light. In slow, jerking motion, he saw something that might have been an old woman once, but was now a blackened and withered thing like a scarecrow, its clothing and skin hanging in streamers that flapped in the wind like pennants.
Neiderhauser was the first to open up.
Whether he killed Chernick or that thing did when it bit out his throat in a spray of dark arterial blood, it was hard to say. Slugs ripped into both Chernick and the dead woman. She was a pitted and insect-ravaged husk and the rounds from Neiderhauser’s M-16 literally blew her apart into a spray of carrion that filled the bottom of the boat, wriggling gruesomely on the anodized aluminum floorboards…bones and scraps of flesh, things that were both and neither like writhing like worms.
And then all around them, faces camouflaged with wet leaves surfaced.
White, scarified hands reached up the sides of the boats.
A faceless thing rose up to Oates’ right and he hammered it with the butt of his 16. It fell back, making a watery, coughing sound. Then he flipped the 16 over and sprayed the water where it sank.
And then the boats were in motion.
Neiderhauser opened up the lead boat, smashing through a gauntlet of white faces and clutching hands. As Jones’ empty boat was flipped over, Hopper’s boat slammed into it and knocked it out of the way. The two boats raced down that alley, barely making the turns.
And as they did so, Oates saw a woman standing on a loading dock, a withered and eyeless thing with long silver hair clotted with leaves and filth trailing down her gray, seamed face and onto her mildewed burial dress.
She was grinning.
Then the boat broke free of the alley and Oates could see the dark, expanding slick of the river as it slowly consumed River Town. Hopper seemed to see it, too, because he turned away from it just as Neiderhauser did. They flew through a street of tall buildings and into a residential district of ancient weather-vaned houses and then there was open fields which had become ponds and then encroaching trees.
Oates had to pry Neiderhauser’s hands from the wheel to get him to slow down and when he did, Neiderhauser looked like he wanted to scratch his eyes out.
“Settle down! Settle the fuck down before you get us all killed!”
Hopper’s boat went right past them, spraying them with filthy water and leaves. And it kept going and going.
“Rubber baby buggie fucking bumpers!” Oates shouted. “Go after those dumb sonsofbitches! Go! Go! Go!”
And they did.
They raced through the falling rain after Hopper’s boat and they caught up with it soon enough. And it wasn’t until Oates saw the high tips of that wrought iron gate pass behind them that he knew they had just entered a sunken cemetery.
And all around them in the wind-lashed night, they could hear the voices of the dead and the damned scraping up from lungs inundated with reeking water and mud.
And this was how things went from bad to worse for Henry T. Oates.
16
