And it was ugly. Plain dirt-ugly. Something you saw crawl out from under a log that you instinctively stepped on without giving it a chance. George was feeling it, too, though he could not exactly describe even to himself the disgust this thing inspired. He didn’t want to kill it exactly… but he sure as hell didn’t want to hug it. It was simply so offensive and outrageous in form, it made you want to look at it. Like a couple spiders mating, you watched even though the idea of it made your flesh crawl and your guts pull up in sickening yellow waves.
It belonged in a jar or stuffed in a museum… but it did not belong alive and vital
It’s just a dumb animal, he told himself, it’s just being curious. It’ll get bored and leave. Sooner or later.
It reminded him of some weird mutant death’shead moth. Almost.
One that had mated with some slimy thing from a primordial sea.
And the thing-whether bird or bat or fish – just hovered there, looking much like a kite as George had thought. Its wings flapped and its body tipped forward, then back, as if it were balancing itself. When it tipped back, George could see that it had a series of small remora-like parasites hanging from its belly. They looked like deflated balloons. When it tipped forward, he saw that it had something like a head, a narrow disk lacking eyes but set with four pale yellow segmented stems like lobster antenna that were whipping about. They were tipped with bright pink nodules that looked something like eyes, but were probably some sort of sensory apparatus.
And it had a mouth… a vertical gash that moved side to side rather than up and down like the jaws of a spider. Beyond that maw, you could see not teeth, but a slick and squirming tongue-like projection of tissue that was just as white as a ghost-pipe. As they watched, it uncoiled like rope from spool and came out tasting the air. It was hollow as a garden hose and about the same thickness, jutting in and out of the mouth maybe six or eight inches like a frog’s tongue after a fly.
Cushing jabbed the oar in its direction and it jerked back, but did not leave. If anything, it came a little closer now, just hovering there like a hummingbird, those wings fluttering and vibrating madly.
“What the hell are we gonna do?” George asked.
As if it heard him, it started making a weird hissing sound, sort of a repetitive whirring like a grasshopper in a distant field.
Gosling said, “I hate to waste a flare on it… but I don’t like the looks of it.”
“Well, somebody do something!” Soltz told them, tired of all this inaction and equally tired of staring at that monstrosity like something that had winged itself free of a B-movie. “We just can’t sit here!”
And maybe the thing heard that or perhaps it just sensed the stress in Soltz’s voice or maybe it had just been biding its time.. . but Soltz saying that was like a catalyst. Like something had jabbed the thing’s asshole with an electric cattle prod. It pulled back, dipped low over the water and came back up. Looked like it might just call it a day and then it came on with attitude.
It swooped right over the top of the raft, one of those claws on its wing tip brushing against one of the arches and slitting it clean open. It swooped again before anyone had a chance to do more than hear the hsssss of the arch deflating and it caught another arch.
Gosling was yelling, “Watch it! Watch it! Keep your fucking heads down!”
And everyone was ducking and shouting and scrambling madly to keep out of its way. Making that weird, trilling th-th-th-th sound, it swooped down again. Cushing ducked under its lethal bulk and George almost did. But as he threw himself to the deckplates, he instinctively threw up his arm to shield his face and one of those brown claws scratched him from elbow to wrist. And that’s all it was, just a scratch. If it had been any more than that, he knew, it would have taken his arm off like surgical steel. He lay there, as everyone shouted and Cushing kept swinging at that crazy bat with his oar, looking dumbly at his arm. At the scratch. Just a white abrasion, really. A white line that went pink, then red as it opened like lips, blood bubbling out.
And the bat-thing kept coming at them, darting in and out with an amazing speed and agility. The arches had been pretty much shredded by then, had collapsed like punctured balloons.
Gosling was trying to get a shot at it with the flare gun, but it moved too fast, kept hovering too close to the men and the raft. And what he didn’t want to do was to burn a hole through either.
Cushing gave it a couple good whacks with the oar and it felt the impact, but it seemed impervious. It was tough and leathery and built for battle. These soft pink-skinned things didn’t stand a chance.
And it was all bad enough up to that point and then things got a little worse.
It rose up above the raft and had it just sat still up there a few more seconds, Gosling might have been able to peg it, but it had no intention. It swooped back down like an enemy divebomber, one of its wings knocking the oar out of Cushing’s hands and went right after Soltz. It targeted him and went right at him, a bee descending on a flower.
Soltz turned to his side as it hit him, as it took hold of him with those hooks, bending its wings like arms. That long, whipping tail was snaking in the air. Gosling took hold of Cushing’s oar and hammered the thing with all he had. It made a squealing sound and that barbed tail whipped past Gosling’s face, just missing his eyes by a scant two inches.
The bat-thing wasn’t on Soltz long, but long enough to make him shudder with convulsions. Long enough so that Gosling saw that white, hollow tube of a tongue come jabbing out and catch Soltz in the cheek, leaving a burning welt in its path… and a sickening odor of seared flesh.
And, yes, long enough to make Soltz scream.
And what a scream it was.
It was a mad, wailing hysterical sound that went right through everyone on the raft and echoed out through that lonesome fog like a child screaming from the bottom of a well.
It flapped and pulled away from Soltz, that tongue catching him one last time, knocking his glasses aside and wetting down his closed, pinched eyelid with a clear mucus. The effects of which were instantaneous: the thin flesh of his eyelid bubbled like hot plastic and melted into threads of skin that looked much like strands of rubber. And then he was really screaming, thrashing and writhing, his eyeball gone a shocking shade of red.
The raft was bobbing and jumping like a carnival ride. The bat-thing had rolled off Soltz, its wings hammering wildly in the raft as it tried to lift itself up. And Gosling had the oar still and as he brought it up to strike that thing, he realized in a split second of absolute revulsion that the thing’s tongue, that it had been tasting Soltz, seeing if he was worth eating, and then he brought the oar down. He’d been aiming at the flat spade of its head, but what he actually hit were two of those wild twitching antennae. The oar snapped one of them clean off and bent another over like a broken reed.
The thing really squealed then, flapping and whirring and jumping until it rose up two or three feet, veered drunkenly to the side and crashed back into the sea. It was trying to fly or swim, but all it was doing was skating over the water in a circle like a dog chasing its own tail.
And Gosling knew suddenly and with complete conviction that those antennae were like some kind of general sensory organ… nose and ears and eyes all rolled into one. It was blind and helpless without them. He had struck the two on the left side of its head and now it could not get its bearings on that side.
But there wasn’t much time to think about any of that.
Although its claws had done no more damage than slitting open three of the four arches-the fourth hanging over like a question mark now, bearing the weight of the other three-that barbed tail had lanced the port gunwale whose chambers were even now deflating.
George was holding his arm which was red with blood. “I’m okay,” he told them. “I’m all right.”
And compared to Soltz, he surely was.
The creature’s claws had slit open his face and shoulders and belly. He was bleeding profusely. He had severe burns on his face from its tongue. And his left eye that had gotten licked… it was just blood-red and swollen like a golf ball, oozing a bile of yellow tears.
And all that was bad enough, but as they went to him he began to have a seizure.
8
It was Fabrini’s idea really, but Cook went along with it. Crycek told them they were inviting death and Menhaus said it would be like living in a coffin. Saks thought it was amusing, told them if they cut him lose he’d even let Fabrini have his sister.
