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.
He looked like a deep-sea fish that had undergone fast, massive decompression.
And this happened in the span of about five seconds.
Five seconds that passed with disturbing, hallucinogenic clarity for the men that witnessed them.
George screamed and fell on his ass.
Gosling came running, shouting and screeching, the crowbar magically in his hands again and he made it right to the bloody, smashed hulk of Marx just as those tentacles gave him a final squeeze to make sure the fight was taken out of him. A gout of blood and tissue vomited from Marx’s distorted mouth and splashed across the front of Gosling’s shirt, but it didn’t even slow him down. He came on swinging, hammering the crowbar into two slimy tentacles that sought him out. They recoiled instantly and were replaced by two others that did not recoil.
Marx’s corpse was upended and yanked out into the mist with such force that his head struck the loading ramp, his bloody scalp peeling free.
George was on his feet by then.
Or was for a moment or two. As he got up, a tentacle swung out for Gosling and he ducked under it and it hit George in the chest, hit him like a railroad tie. Knocked him up and against the wall of the cargo bay and he slumped over, barely avoiding another which snaked back around in a question mark, seeking his head.
Dazed, confused, the wind kicked out of him, George saw another tentacle coming at him, coiling and slimy and evil, and all he could think was what it was going to feel like when those hooks sank in him and those muscles squeezed his insides to paste.
“Look out, George!” someone cried. “Oh, Jesus, look out…”
7
Cushing heard that voice cry out and saw that tentacle squirming in George’s direction and he reacted without thinking.
He grabbed George by the ankle – that slick tentacle passing so close to his face that he could smell the stink of the rotting sea bottom on it – and dragged him over near the Hummer. And did it fast, that tentacle coming back around like scythe, looking for something to squeeze. At any other time, he knew, he would have had to grab George’s legs in both hands and then done a lot of puffing and struggling… but at that moment, his adrenaline was amped so high, he just grabbed that one ankle and yanked George away like he was stuffed with dry hay.
As he turned, he saw something that nearly drove him insane.
Just a momentary glimpse, but it was sheer poison. Fifty or sixty feet away, the mist parted momentarily to give him a view of something that curdled him straight to the marrow. Spotlighted in the Hummer’s headlights, he saw Marx’s corpse being fed into a gargantuan puckered mouth the size of a train tunnel. Saw that tentacle stuff Marx’s remains in there like a tasty treat. Into that gigantic chewing hole that was filled with a corkscrewing series of flabby tongues that peeled him down to a skeleton in seconds.
Then the mist closed in, covered the atrocity of that mouth and Cushing saw something like a huge yellow eye big as a wagon wheel looking right at him. Then it was invisible, too.
Three more tentacles swooped in out of the mist with a surprising, violent speed. One of them knocked Gosling on his ass and another entwined his ankle and still another brushed across his chest, those glistening hooks ripping open the front of his shirt and his chest with it.
“Get back!” he screeched to the men, his men, his voice raw with pain. He thrashed and panted and howled. “Get back oh Jesus get back-”
Cushing jumped forward, dodging under and around whipping, angry tentacles, picked up Marx’s hatchet- hammer and swung it with everything he had at another tentacle reaching for Gosling. The blade split open that greasy, beaded red flesh and a spray of brown blood broke against his face with a burning sensation.
The tentacle which had been dragging Gosling off jerked as Cushing chopped into the other one. It jerked violently and unclenched, tossing Gosling through the air. He slammed into the front of the Hummer, collapsing over George. His ankle where the squid had him was eaten right down to the bone.
George was dragging him off then, mumbling and whimpering under his breath and Chesbro and Pollard had been finally shocked out of their stupor. They came forward, helping George pull Gosling back into the plane, beyond the Hummers.
Cushing dodged and ducked and made it to the Hummer. One searching tentacle tripped him, but he made it out of its reach and then the shit really started to rain down. For that grotesque monster squid knew there was food in the shell of that plane and it intended on having it.
More of those tentacles came in through the cargo door. And not just two or three, but a dozen, two dozen, filling the door with a squirming, seeking multitude of boneless arms that were draped with seaweed, many bigger around than dock pilings and concrete pillars. They flowed through the door like a mutiny of red, bloated worms, those suckers pulsing open and close, the tearing hooks scratching along the metal floor seeking flesh to rend.
And Cushing thought: This is no squid, this is no fucking cuttlefish, I don’t know what sort of blasphemy it is, but it can’t be real, something like this cannot be alive…
The tentacles were not just inside, but outside, too.
They were rustling and slithering over the outer hull with a rubbery, squeaking sound, those hooks scratching away over the metal shell like thousands of nails.
