“Yeah,” Liss said, caught up in it, too, now.
Torrio nodded, but never spoke. There was a ripple in the water just ahead of him as if something large had just passed beneath the surface. It could have been a big carp out feeding, but nobody thought that for a moment.
Hopper played his light on the houses nearest them. Some were two-story jobs. At least, they could go upstairs and get out of the water for a bit. It was better than this, anyway. He chose one at random.
“Come on,” he said.
The other two fell in behind him. They moved as quickly as they could towards the house, water splashing around them. The house came out of the rain and mist slowly, a tall narrow structure that looked impossibly dark and forbidding. But a haunted house beat the stinking, flooded streets any day.
There was a splash behind them.
They whirled around.
“What was that?” Torrio said.
They were a good thirty feet from the house. If there was anything in the water with them and it didn’t want them getting inside, it had plenty of time to show itself.
Hopper was not only warm now, but shivering at the same time. It felt like somebody had tied his guts into a square knot. He felt his breath in his lungs, the water running down his face. A cold chill swept up his back and he felt a sharp pain in his bowels like he might shit himself.
Something splashed off to the left and the water roiled.
“Hopper…” Torrio began.
They were shining their lights in every which direction, the beams filled with raindrops and fingers of mist.
“Shit,” Torrio said, taking a few splashing steps back.
“What?”
“I saw something…something just under the water over there. Something white.”
He pointed his light in that direction, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. The beam flickered with the shaking of his hand.
And Liss cried out. “Ouch. Shit. Something…I think something bit me.”
Oh, Jesus, not good, not good at all, Hopper was thinking. It was like crossing a tributary of the Amazon or something, piranhas circling them, coming in for the kill. He wondered if they could smell blood…whatever was out there.
“All right,” he said, “let’s get to that fucking house. Now.”
They started to move, going as fast as they could and the water was sloshing around them, waves cast in every direction. But they all knew that it wasn’t just their movement stirring up the water, it was something else.
The house was closer.
But not close enough.
Something bumped into Hopper’s leg and he let out a little muted cry, but nobody paid attention. What was going to happen, he knew, was going to happen very soon now. And before they reached the house. Right then he started doing something he hadn’t done in years: he began to pray.
“Hurry up!” Torrio said, taking the lead. “They’re in the water! Something’s in the fucking water with us!”
They charged forward and then Liss made a strange almost yelping sound like he’d been punched in the stomach. They turned and put their lights on him. He was just standing there, his face contorted with horror. Something hit him from below and he went one way and then it hit him again, and he went the other way. And then he screamed into the night and fell backwards, going completely under. He fought to the surface, choking and gasping, and then he went under again.
Neither Hopper or Torrio moved.
They both knew that Liss needed help, but they honestly didn’t know how to help him. They felt powerless. Just locked down with abject terror. And maybe Hopper’s comparison of shipwrecked sailors was right on the money…for what did you do and what could you really do when the sharks took the first member of your party?
Liss came to the surface again and there was blood streaming down his face. And there was no doubt as to why: a great strip of flesh had been ripped from his left eye socket to his lip and it hung there in a grisly flap. Water was spraying around as he thrashed this way and that and nobody could tell what was going on. He called out their names, spitting water and blood. Then he turned around, trying to pull something off his back and they saw.
They saw what had him.
At first Hopper thought, crazily, that there was a baby on his back and then maybe a dwarf. But it was neither. It was roughly the shape of an infant, but bloated to twice the size. Just a fish belly-white thing that was lumpy and grotesque, set with a series of irregular fleshly mounds like great tumors rising from its back and erupting from its bulbous head. Liss went down on his knees in the water and the thing clung to him like some monstrous, evil twin growing out of his back. But it wasn’t growing out of him, it was clinging to him with claws that were sunk in his back.
“Oh my God,” Torrio said.
And that summed it up, more or less. They had the lights right on it and it didn’t seem to care for that much. Its face was a semi-human distortion, bulb-shaped and made out of a white, oozing flesh that looked like it had been worked from clay. One side sliding down in the process so that the right side of its face rode up much higher than the left. Its left eye was little more than a slit webbed shut by filaments of skin; its right huge and black and shining. Its mouth drawn downward like a rut.
It looked right at them with a mindless hatred, its rubbery lips drawn away from nubby teeth. It made a low mewling sound.
Torrio couldn’t take it.
He opened up on it. Rounds drilled into Liss and the thing, scattering bits of them into the water. Liss went under, taking that horror with him. Liss did not come back up, but the thing did. A great section of its cranium had been blasted away, something with the texture and color of dirty motor oil running down its face.
It was enough.
Hopper put a few rounds in its direction and then stumbled blindly through the water to the house, Torrio just ahead of him. Their lights were flickering and spearing about, casting fantastic shadows around them in the screaming darkness. The front door was open, banging against the wall.
Torrio led the way in. The house was set above the level of the street, so the water was only up to their knees by that point.
“Find the stairs,” Hopper said.
Torrio did and they made for them. Weighted down in wet fatigues and raingear and equipment, they felt like they each weighed roughly five-hundred pounds.
Behind them, there was more splashing.
They put their lights back there and saw maybe a dozen white, mounded bodies moving through the water in their direction. Torrio squeezed off a few rounds, but the things kept coming, pushing slowly through the water in a tide of white clumped flesh. They were crawling like babies, nearly underwater, making for the stairs like lungfish coming out of the water to lay their eggs.
Torrio and Hopper pulled themselves up the stairs. Had they been dry, they could have raced up them. But as it was, they struggled up them like old men, each step a chore. At the top, winded and dripping, they put the lights on the water below.
Yes, the things were still coming.
They both saw them. Like horribly mutated fetuses, the things began dragged themselves up out of that dirty water. Each of them had the general form of a human infant, but exaggerated to a shocking extreme. White-fleshed and bulging with morbid cancerous-looking growths. Some had faces and some had none, just wide oval mouths that were more like those of lampreys than human beings. Some had two eyes and some had only one, others had eyes opening in their chests and bellies and even in the palms of their hands. Some had huge, spidery limbs on one side and withered sticks on the other. Others had too many arms or no arms at all. And quite a few had limbs that
