“Don't go outside,” Brenda said. Her voice trembled. Her eyes twinkled with madness.
Brenda was concerned about him? As if she hadn't just had the world's most horrible experience! “I'll be careful.”
As Nathan reached for the door's handle, he stopped. His heart hammered in his chest. From outside came the screams of women which rose like prayers to the night sky. One scream stood out above all others in intensity and volume. It was Natalie.
CHAPTER 34
Attack
NATALIE HEARD A flapping noise from behind her, a liquid sound, like something from an X-rated movie, but several octaves too low. She knew what it was.
“Ahh,” she said as she felt liquid on her shoulder. She wiped at it with her hand and saw it had turned dark sepia and crimson with syrup of some unknown composition. The sepia syrup smelled like ammonia. It was beginning to sting like burning lava. With praying-mantis speed, the pycnogonid had somehow hauled itself onto the deck with little sound. Of course, despite its silent entry, its massive bulk could not be hidden and the boat now rocked with the additional weight.
Water cascaded from its monstrous body. Its huge eyes were afire, its colossal pincers working and gnashing back and forth. In a moment it oriented on her.
“Nathan,” she screamed as the huge creature rose in twitching terror against a starless, black sky. She had become relatively ineffective since her gun had run out of ammunition. She had simply stood and watched as others reacted to the predations of the monster. She had hoped to clear her head out here, and return ready to act like the policewoman she was supposed to be. But the sheer size and ferocity of the thing, and her lack of fire- power, unnerved her, leaving her emotionally feeble. She was disgusted with herself—but also terrified.
The ghostly mass of legs began to reach for her. She retreated a few steps and slipped on a burger wrapper. Her knee crashed into a discarded beer can, causing a sharp pain to climb her leg.
“Damn,” she said as her empty automatic skidded away from her and clattered on the wet deck. She reached for it, hoping she could use it as a kind of club, but could not get to it in time. She was not normally a woman who cried readily, but she sobbed now. Her hair was plastered against her head like a wet, straggly wig, surely making her look exactly as messed up as she felt.
“Falow,” she screamed, trying to quell her rising panic as she breathed harshly from her open mouth. The spider was only a few feet from her. She felt as if her eyes were taking on a dull sheen as of plastic pottery.
Something thick and soggy pressed against her legs. It felt like a cold, sticky tongue caressing her. What is that? she thought as beads of perspiration formed on her temples. But her thought was rhetorical; she knew what it was, having seen it with Brenda in the coffee shop.
It was a segment of the sea spider's digestive tract, which had evaginated through its proboscis like an inside-out balloon. As its digestive walls made contact with her, the creature trembled with anticipation. It made a slurping sound.
“It's trying to eat her,” a passenger screamed. “Help!”
Natalie felt a burning on her skin, like a high fever. It had to be from the digestive fluid. She tried to twist away from the fleshy thing looming in front of her.
Like a scene out of an adventure movie, Falow leaped from an upper rail near the bridge and landed on his feet on the deck about thirty feet from Natalie. Without a moment's hesitation, he emptied his gun into one of the spider's eyes and legs closest to her, and the pycno backed away.
But it paused for only a second. Natalie got up, her right ankle striking a deck chair. It was only with the greatest effort that she continued to rise to her feet and steady herself by holding onto the back of a table. She was only vaguely aware that her leg was bleeding as she cast a horrified glance back over her shoulder in the direction of the creature.
Before she could think of what to do next its long proboscis shot out of the main mass of its body with the speed of a chameleon's tongue and enveloped her. Dark stars of light skated across her field of vision. One of the spider's leg spikes ripped through the remains of her shirt like a razor and punctured her left lung. A growing numbness spread through her chest.
“Gah,” she choked as she gasped for air. She fought with all her waning strength, knowing that she had to tear herself from the beast's embrace because soon she would be unconscious. Dull drum sounds, harbingers of approaching asphyxiation, began to bang in her ears. Her weakening screams rose and fell with the thumping of her own heart.
Fear drove her to try a final attempt to dislodge herself from the creature. First she bit at it, tearing away a mouthful of horrible urine-stinging flesh. She bit down again and something crunched like the cartilage and gristle from a chicken bone. The warm, sour taste of aging bacon filled her mouth.
She tasted vomit in the back of her throat. Then she poked the nails of her right hand into the fleshy interior of the proboscis as hard as she could.
This had a momentary effect. The pycno's grip relaxed, as brown juice oozed from its injured flesh. It was evidently not well equipped to deal with a creature who fought back from the inside. But this was probably more like a mosquito trying to sting the inside of a frog's mouth; it was hardly a fatal strike.
Natalie continued to chew and gnaw at the interior of the creature's sucking appendage. She would not give up. Not give up, no matter how little it ultimately counted.
“Ummph,” she grunted through a mouthful of blood. Her lips felt as dead as bone.
“Keep shooting at it,” she heard Nathan scream to Falow as he gazed at the tattered rags of Natalie's shirt. She caught a glimpse of his face. He looked as if his stomach was twisted with nausea. But at least he was here!
“I don't have any more bullets,” Falow yelled back. Him, too! Why hadn't they thought to prepare for the worst? They had come to this fray like rank amateurs. Had they thought that a few little bullets would scare away the monster? What utter folly! Falow was evidently on the edge of exhaustion, astonished as he saw Natalie continue to fight, and her angry refusal to relinquish hope. He didn't know how weak-kneed she had been, until she had to fight for her life.
Natalie's eyes caught Nathan's for a moment. I will not let you die, his gaze promised her as he searched for a weapon with which to attack the beast. But he had to be wondering whether it was a promise he could keep.
Then the pycno must have suffered a lapse of attention. For a moment Natalie broke free. She stood unsteadily, not quite believing it, trying to get sufficiently organized to run to safety. She looked back at the passengers on the ferry boat. The burnt bacon taste lingered horribly in her mouth. Stroboscopic flashes of lightning made the scene seem like something out of a horror movie. She knew she had little time to get away. But her body just wasn't responding well.
As she tripped again, she saw some of the passengers staring back at her with the red bloodshot eyes of little rabbits. All around her was the stink of sulphur, rotting meat, and the smell of her own half swallowed vomit.
But she tried. She was on hands and knees now. She crawled about six feet. Then she heard the horrid scraping of its legs against the deck. Close, way too close. Then, to her right, she saw a leg inches from her face, a bristly tan limb with multiple spikes. She looked up, looked into the charred hole where one of its eyes should have been.
For some reason, Natalie had a vision of her friend and the apartment they had shared over the barbershop on Main Street. Then of the house she had lived in before her parents died. She wanted her mother. She missed her mother. For a moment she heard a piano playing. Again it was her mother, this time playing the old baby grand piano in their house, the song was Moonlight Sonata.
The vision was suddenly cut off. With a muted screech, the sea spider grabbed her torso and lifted her high up into the air. It was wrapped around her, smothering her. It waved her body round and round like a rodeo rider twirling a lasso. She would have screamed if she could, or fainted, if she cou
ld. Why hadn't she fled the monster faster, when she had the chance? Or had it freed her deliberately, playing cat and mouse with her?
Her mouth broke free from its muscular surroundings for a moment. She gasped for breath and continued to scream. The pycno applied pressure to her head, and then her body began to convulse and jerk like a puppet guided by an amateur puppeteer. She saw the skin on her hands changing colors, and thought that her face must also be changing colors like a traffic light, from red, to orange, to a sickly green. She stopped screaming—and the monster dropped her limp body onto the deck like discarded rubbish. She never felt the landing.
CHAPTER 35
Battle
A FEW PASSENGERS far away from the pyenogonid ran forward to help Natalie, but the monster twitched and frightened them away. Some peered over the rail as if expecting to find her in the water. There was only a faint glimmer of light from some exotic bright-eyed fish which swam near the murky surface.
Nathan ran toward the body, but the legs and snout oriented alertly on him. He knew that they would grab the moving target first—but that there was no guarantee he could distract it permanently from Natalie. It might simply hurl him into the water for later consumption, as it had Lisa. So he had to find a way to distract it that would keep its attention indefinitely, or at least until others could get to Natalie and drag her to safety.
Assuming that it was not already too late. She had been wrapped in that awful proboscis, and then had taken a bad fall to the deck. Was she all right? He thought he saw some motion, but the lights from the boat were too dim to reveal her clearly. She was only a shadowy shape against the dark deck. She had to be alive—but wouldn't remain so unless he got her clear very soon.
What could he do? He gazed wildly around, seeking something, anything that might offer itself. His frantic eye crossed the dark water. For a moment he thought he saw her body out there, with albino mutant crabs crawling on her outstretched arms. A few grasped her hair with large wicked claws, and then she was pulled under.
No! That was horrible imagination. Or maybe it was the body of a passenger he didn't know who had fallen into the water. But Natalie, still alive, was clearly on the deck, about to be gobbled by the spider, and he had to get focused and save her, no matter what it took.
“Natalie,” Nathan screamed in frustration as he grabbed Bryan's knife. She couldn't be dead. Not the woman he had just spent a beautiful evening with in town, in the forest, and on the beach at night. In Come By Chance, discovering glorious love. Not Natalie who never had a mean word to say, who seemed so kind. Who had evoked his love, full-blown, when he had never expected to find anything like it here.
He looked across the deck, running wildly, brandishing the knife. He could not lose her. His throat was tight, his eyes watery. Maybe he could attract the attention of the monster to himself, then cut quickly into the joints between its limbs, its proboscis, crippling it. Anything, to save Natalie!
The pycno seemed to be watching him. Good! He would lead its attention as far away as possible. He charged up onto the bridge.
The monster moved, its legs reaching for Natalie's body.
“No!” Without warning, Nathan suddenly leaped from the bridge onto the pycnogonid's bony back and drove Bryan's steak-knife into a line on its exoskelton where the primary brain joined the spinal cord. He buried it to the hilt, splitting the shell with a sharp crunch. He knew exactly where to strike a creature like this. Nathan realized that he looked like a cowboy riding a bucking bronco, although he was more like a matador thrusting the barb into the shoulder of the bull.
But he doubted that the knife was long enough to do enough damage to a creature this size. He had to find a more vulnerable target. He withdrew the knife and drove it again into one of the five black eyes. “Take that, you filth!” he screamed. “Take your own medicine!”
But the sea spider jerked backward and the knife blade snapped. He had lost his weapon!
Yet Nathan did not stop. He took the remnant of the large knife handle and slammed it down with all his might. This time he felt the spider's exoskeleton near the base of the brain crack, and he hit it in the same place again and again. A loose slew of mucus-like substance spilled from the crack. He was getting somewhere!
The pycno jumped, dropping something like a disembodied arm from its mouth, and regurgitated the half-dissolved contents of its many stomachs. The jellylike substance from its stomach churned itself on the deck for a few seconds as if alive. Had he managed to stop the monster?
The pycno continued to eject various marine and human pieces in mangled lumps with little form. Then its legs quivered as if about to descend on Natalie's body. In any other circumstance Nathan might have admired its single-mindedness. But not now. What did it take to stop this horrible thing?
A brief gagging noise came from Nathan's throat. The knife handle, his main defense, fell out of his hand. He began beating at the creature's five black eyes with his bare hands. The rage within him was a living thing. It was as if the spider had awakened a sleeping giant within the man. A giant to rival the sea creature itself.
“Die!” Nathan cried. He rode the pycno, screaming and yelling as it whipped him around and around and even tried to turn itself upside down in an attempt to dislodge him from its back. It had finally recognized that he was dangerous to it; he had its full attention. But he was riding a tiger. Would he ever be able to get off it? It hardly mattered, for he had no intention of getting off. He had come not to ride it, but to kill it.
Lightning shattered the gray heavens and lit up the mayhem on the ferry. One bolt struck the ship's deck, severing some of the remaining railing from the boat. The electrical crackle continued for a few seconds but did not slow the fury of Nathan's attack.
The pycno rose up on its posterior legs, pawing obscenely at the air. Its huge body cast shadows even in the darkness of night. Nathan realized that deadly as the monster was when attacking other creatures around it, it was at a serious disadvantage dealing with a creature on it. Its legs weren't made for this.
“Yeeeee!” The creature was doing something with its proboscis that caused it to emit a high-pitched whine. Its multiple eyes bulged like balloons being filled with air as it slashed at the steel hull of the ferry. The wind stung Nathan's ears, made his eyes tear, and pasted frost on his mustache. He knew that the creature was trying to get at the source of its pain, and didn't quite know how. He understood that feeling, for it had been his own until very recently.
Natalie still lay on the deck. The pycno was distracted, but had not moved far enough away from her to allow anyone else to approach. The sight of her motionless body set Nathan off again.
“Not enough?” Nathan demanded as he drove his hand into the open wound near the nerve cords. The anger exploded in him so intensely that his fingers trembled and his teeth were clenched. He screamed with fury and a hunger for violence. He reached deeper into the creature and felt some of the tissue tearing in his hand as he pulled out gobs of white muscle and membrane. “Then have some more!” He jammed his hand in again.
The pycno tried again to dislodge him but could not reach him. Then its wild eyes met Nathan's. Its strange, alien face seemed contorted with rage. Nathan hesitated for a second as he gazed at those gleaming empty eyes that looked more dead than alive. Did his own eyes mirror that rage, that deadness?
A lightning streak reflected off the colored orb and drove Nathan to increase his attack. He crushed one eye as he struck with the flat of his hand: short, vicious, hard. He smashed his fist into another eye and felt the black globe crush and ooze dark liquid. It trickled down his legs like steaming soup. Step by step, he was blinding it.
The pycno went wild, with all of its legs attempting to reach Nathan, but as he had discovered, the thing could not reach him if he huddled close to its body. Now all he had to do was hang on and let it lose strength. Just so long as it didn't go for Natalie again.
Its movements slowed, became imprecise. A pool of green
blood, not yet congealed, bloomed from the pycno's eye sockets in a small puddle. After a minute, he realized that all of the eyes on the body had been destroyed. The spider was blind, except for the two eyes at the end of its proboscis.
It swung that proboscis around to gaze at Nathan, and then vomited on him. As Nathan wiped the ooze away from his eyes, a heavy wet thing, its digestive wall, started slobbering its way up his belly and chest. It then expelled green corrosive substance from its mouth, but the bulk of the goo missed him.
Now the rest of the world returned to his awareness. “Here, take this,” the captain shouted as he threw a flare gun to Nathan. Nathan reached for it but dropped it. The gun clattered to the deck. “Try again!” Calamari shouted. He threw a second gun, and this time Nathan caught it.
Nathan cried out and shoved his left hand into the digestive walls, which opened and closed spasmodically. Then he took away his hand and pulled the end off the flare gun. Orange flame shot out of the gun, which he jammed with all his might into the beige mucus walls of the sea spider's digestive tract.
Suddenly the digestive walls withdrew. Nathan smelled an unpleasant aroma, a cross between burnt bacon and ammonia. The pycno's legs thrashed madly, but they weren't taking the creature anywhere. A minute later the creature was motionless, as if hypnotized with pain and failure.
Nathan reached into the open wound, reached deep, and pulled out a majority of its primary brain. The creature was now anencephalic, left with merely a brain stem, a tiny stump of a brain, and a few minor brains—the ganglia. If it were to survive it could now exist only in a persistent vegetative state—the remaining stalk of its brain allowed the body to perform basic, reflexive functions like breathing. Its primitive heart, the hemocoel cavity, would continue to pump blood, and its flesh would be maintained, assuming someone fed it. But the spider would never again be conscious of its environment, never see, never feel.
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