The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Lockhart, Ross

  On Water Street, right in front of the wharf, Thompsons and Browning machine-guns fired such long bursts they should have melted the barrels into slag. Marines ran this way and that. It appeared at first as if every Marine in First Company was trying to spend every last round as quickly as possible by firing into the blackness under the docks. A wild-eyed corporal ran past Lieutenant Cobb, a can of belted machine-gun ammo in each hand, screaming, “They’re under the docks! Get ’em! Get ’em!”

  The air burned with cordite. Every breath scalded the lungs. But even above the scent of war, a more ponderous stench asserted itself, the old rotting smell of dead fish, now grown monumental. It displaced the air and seemed to steal the last usable oxygen. Hennessey almost believed that his stomach would surrender its contents to the stink, when he noticed the croaking, bellowing chorus rising from the wharves of Innsmouth blending with the splashing of hundreds of flailing limbs. The men of Third Company, Third Platoon stumbled forward to the edge of the sea wall, peering down among the jumble of ships’ masts and pilings. Hennessey followed, straining into the dark tangle. And at that moment, everyone wished they were back in the jungle with Sandino.

  Below the docks, outlined by the strobing muzzle flashes of nearly a hundred weapons, clinging to wharf pilings, hanging from the masts and rigging, and crouched on the listing decks of Innsmouth’s worm-eaten fishing fleet, squirmed an army out of drowned nightmares. Two arms, two legs, and a bloated, lolling head—each stood like a man with a cork-screwed spine. But the similarity to terrestrial life ended at that, for these were creatures of the deep. The white gleam of the flare reflected in hundreds of pairs of fat, oily eyes mounted on the sides of scaly heads, the eyes of creatures crafted by evolution to strain every last particle of light from their environment. Wet, lazy gills opened and closed on the sides of their stout necks. Their taloned, webbed hands and feet, like baseball gloves, were splayed wide. Their bottom jaws dropped open like the cavernous mouths of sea bass and again those barking croaks issued forth. “Iä! Iä!” came the war cry from the deep. “Iä!”

  Nobody had to give the order to open fire. It erupted in a spasmodic fusillade that sent dozens more of the barking horde tumbling into the black waters. Hennessey brought his Thompson to his shoulder and began firing bursts into the thickest knot of them, chopping through rubbery hide, sending gouts of scarlet and other colors over the rotten timbers. They fell, only to be immediately replaced by a dozen more. The Marines, Hennessey included, were all screaming now, nearly drowning out the croaking of the fish-men. But they could not slow the charge. Pump-action shotguns worked with blinding speed, Thompsons raked over the braying throng, but it was not enough. Within seconds the things gained the sea wall and began to climb.

  As the clouds of burnt powder obscured the leaping, flopping carnage, Hennessey saw some of the creatures haul themselves atop the docks and begin running toward the wall. He sighted the Thompson and fired a burst. Two of the things dropped like stringless marionettes, but eight more leapt forward. To his right, Charlie Paskow was calmly racking round after round through his trench gun, ejecting spent casings that sizzled in the snow. Hennessey could see he’d never get a bead before the things crashed into the Marines. “They’re on top of the docks!” he screamed. Paskow jerked his head up and put his next 12-gauge round into the closest thing’s chest, blowing it off its feet and into the bay. PFC Grodin, a tough kid from Pittsburgh, snapped off a load of buckshot that caught the next beast in the leg, nearly severing it at the knee. And then they were among the Marines, webbed, talon-tipped fingers raking into winter coats.

  The mayhem was total. Private Franklin, a Marine from Second Squad, went down under two of them, his Thompson crushed to his chest. Razor-sharp talons sliced divots out of his jawbone and tore open his equipment harness. One clawed at his face and neck as he struggled to kick away and bring his weapon to bear. The other thing threw itself onto his legs and sank its fangs into his groin. Franklin’s keening scream was broken as the first tore out his throat. A private by the name of McVeigh, his bayonet driven up to its hilt in the belly of an onrushing fish-man, danced in circles as the beast tried to claw its way up the Springfield rifle to get him. After desperately chambering a fresh round, McVeigh blew it off the end with a resoundingly wet report. Grodin put a load of buckshot into the head of the beast shredding Franklin’s throat and, with a scream, drove his bayonet through the neck of the beast locked to Franklin’s crotch. He twisted the trench gun, wrenching its jaws open as it gargled madly, spraying angry red blood from its twitching gill slits. “Die! Fucking die!” He stepped over the thing, straddling its back, jerked out the weapon and thrust it into the thing’s spine, quelling the spastic twitch of its limbs. Meanwhile, Paskow held his empty trench gun in his left hand and serenely dropped one charging nightmare after another with careful slugs from his .45 automatic.

  Hennessey brought his Thompson to bear in time to catch the second wave, which was running—no, hopping—across the docks. He held the trigger and hosed them down with a twenty-round burst, barrel low, the barrage knocking seven off the dock as they croaked in shock and anger. Hennessey’s mind was running on little more than adrenaline and boot-camp training. The fifty-round drum was empty and there was no time to change magazines. He dove to his left, rolled the slippery monstrosity off the corpse of Private Franklin, scooped up the fallen Marine’s Thompson, and spun on the icy cobblestones to loose another stream of fire.

  Privates Bromley and Helms thrust their bayonets at the creatures scrabbling up the stone sea wall, bursting the soft, fat eyes like egg yolks. One screamed an almost human wail, clutched its oozing eye with both claws and pitched backwards onto its fellows. A creature straddling Private Dean’s back sunk its teeth into his shoulder, and tore loose a bloody chunk of meat and wool just a second before Paskow blew off the top of its skull with the .45. Meanwhile, McVeigh and Boyle were finishing off two wounded creatures. The flopping abominations croaked and brayed pathetically, gagging on their blood as the Marines thrust and twisted their bayonets. Boyle jerked his bayonet out of the creature at his feet just in time to turn, reverse grip, and swing the butt like a golf club into the face of one struggling to hoist itself over the sea wall. Grodin loosed another’s grip on the wall by pulping its head with a load of buckshot.

  Hennessey had exhausted a second drum when the things gave up rushing along the tops of the tattered docks. But they were still scrambling up the sea wall. Most of the trench guns had quickly emptied their five rounds and were slow to reload. With the onslaught coming so fast, there was little time to shove the shells into the tube one at a time. The battle at the sea wall was rapidly coming down to buttstocks and bayonets against raking claws and dripping fangs.

  A rushing sound and rising light caught Hennessey’s attention as a ball of flame rose up from one of the fishing boats, splashing gasoline over the rotten timbers. At the northernmost end of the docks, a Marine from First Company was pouring a can of gasoline over the sea wall onto the scaly, flopping horde while another lit them with a flare pistol. Burning, keening beasts tossed themselves back into the bay, extinguishing the flames, and then scrambled right back over the mounting dead at the wall’s base. Another Marine tossed a gas can onto the deck of a fishing boat and was followed by a shot from Lieutenant Cobb’s flare pistol, sending it up with a cheerful whump.

  Hoskins, a private from Second Squad, held tight to his trench gun as one of the creatures below grabbed the barrel. He went over the side like a Vaudeville comedian getting the hook, shrieking loudly. But not for long. Within seconds something at the foot of the sea wall tossed his head back up onto Water Street, still seated in its helmet and trailing a few links of spine. Hoskins looked more surprised than upset. The demonstration had its effect. All along the sea wall the Marines backed away from the edge, just long enough for the things to haul themselves up. It was one thing to kill the monsters from atop the wall while they tried to climb, but another to face them on
equal ground. All along the edge, the sea wall was topped by another wall, this one made of slippery green flesh and glittering talons, rearing up as if in triumph. Or, at least, until the Browning opened up.

  The first tracer Hennessey saw looked like it passed about a half-foot in front of his nose. He slipped and scrabbled on the icy cobbles, trying to back-pedal in time to avoid getting mowed down. To Hennessey’s right, in front of the Marsh fish-packing plant, First Company’s water-cooled Browning gobbled belt after belt of ammunition, turning Water Street into a shooting gallery. The things hopped forward into the crossfire like a wave, dozens and dozens of them. Bullets and tracers ripped down Water Street, a wall of invisible razors shot through with lightning. The beasts charging through it simply came apart. Everywhere, monsters burst from a thousand miraculous stigmata. Most squawked and croaked as they crashed to the ground, but even stitched with dozens of bullet wounds, a few crawled forward, sliding over the bodies of their brethren, dragging themselves on hemorrhaging stumps and trailing ropy intestines. From behind their invisible fortress of screaming metal, the Marines desperately reloaded their weapons and blasted any lucky enough to cross the barrier of flying lead and magnesium.

  “Grenade!” bellowed Sergeant Miles, holding one of the metal pineapples over his head. “Grenade!” With that, he lobbed it over the sea wall. The grenade exploded with a dull, wet thump, punctuated by inhuman shrieks of agony. Mud and other less wholesome semi-solids flew into the night air. Marines began tearing grenades from their harnesses, ripping the pins out, and hurling them after the first. Hennessey ripped a grenade off his harness and tossed it clear into Innsmouth Bay. Then the air was torn apart by a staccato barrage of ear-splitting explosions. It looked to Hennessey as if a dozen photographers beyond the wall were snapping flashbulbs at some Broadway celebrity. The Marines kept throwing their grenades over the side, some laughing hysterically. Within thirty seconds, the only thing answering the explosions was the sound of debris pattering to the earth or splashing into the harbor.

  Nothing climbed up the sea wall now. No tracers screamed down Water Street. There was no movement except the slow, painful wriggling of the dying. Slowly the Marines began picking their way through the tangle of carnage. Hennessey felt drunk, lightheaded. As he inched through the dead, he jumped at the crack of gunfire as here and there a Marine delivered a perfunctory coup de grace.

  In the light from the fires, Hennessey could now see that the area beneath the dock was awash with broken bodies. Fins, scales, and gills glistened in the orange flames. They’d killed far more of the creatures than Hennessey had suspected. The scene was almost like that of a beach after a red-tide fish-kill. And at the base of the sea wall, the bodies piled one atop the other in a bloody pyramid. The pile of gutted and boned fish-men had brought the shoal at least six feet higher. Hennessey had never seen such a slaughter, not even in picture books about the Great War.

  A few of the fishing boats moored beneath the drunkenly listing docks still had fuel in their tanks. As they cooked off one by one, they sent fireballs roaring skyward. It wouldn’t take too long for the docks to turn into a twisted maze of blazing timbers and planks. Hennessey strained for any movement in the thick gray haze. There was nothing. The fish-men had had enough. For the moment.

  “Sound off by squads, you fucking apes!” bellowed Sergeant Miles. “First Squad!” Only five out of eight men barked out their names. As the rest of the platoon sounded off, Hennessey took a quick mental inventory of the remaining men in his squad. Lyman…he was still lying at the foot of the stairs at the Sergeants’ house. Paskow was dropping the magazine from his .45 and slapping another in place. He didn’t even look out of breath. Boyle’s pants were torn open at the left knee and his boot was wet with his blood. McVeigh and Grodin were panting like dogs but unmarked. The other two, Baldwin and Rhodes, had ended up on the north end of the defense line and had come through unscathed.

  The rest of Third Platoon was mauled. Four Marines were dead, including Franklin with his throat torn out and balls bitten off. Eleven men were wounded, two so badly they’d soon be joining the dead. Out of the thirty-two men who comprised Third Platoon, only twenty-one were still able to fire a weapon. By some miracle, seven of them were in Hennessey’s squad. There was a platoon from Second Company stumbling about with just seventeen men still standing, and the two platoons from First Company who’d begun the defense of the sea wall couldn’t even form a full platoon between them. The wounded screamed and moaned; the others prayed and even wept. The only sounds of sanity came from Sergeant Miles bellowing orders to the survivors, policing up weapons and the dead.

  At that moment, Lieutenant Cobb was standing next to First Company’s Captain Frost. The Captain was screaming and gesturing wildly with his .45. “They came out of the sea, goddammit! Right out of the sea! They were all over us before we knew what was happening. It’s a goddamn miracle it was only a dozen or so to start with. If they’d hit us with that second wave first…” Frost’s quavering voice trailed off and then rose hysterically again. “We gotta get the Navy! We gotta get depth charges!”

  “Sir! Sir!” Cobb hissed, shaking the man. “Calm down, sir. I need to know what you want us to do?”

  “Do?” Frost shrieked. “What can we do? We’ve got to get out of here is what!”

  “Dammit, sir, if we pull out, those things will overrun the town.” Cobb gripped the Captain’s shoulders in a vise-grip. “The battalion will be overrun. We’re all spread out policing up the locals. If we’re overrun, it’ll unravel. It’ll be a slaughter!”

  “Fuck them!” Frost giggled hysterically. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”

  Suddenly, the loudest noise on the docks was the sound of Lieutenant Cobb slapping Captain Frost’s face. Frost trembled with anger, his red-rimmed eyes jumping in their sockets. “I’ll see you broken for that.”

  Cobb drew in a measured breath and set his jaw. “Yes, sir. And if you run, or do anything to incite others to run, they’ll be trying me for murder as well.” Then he turned to Sergeant Miles. “Put the Captain someplace where he’ll be out of the way, Sergeant.”

  For the next ten minutes, Lieutenant Cobb turned into Blackjack Pershing, barking commands in rapid succession, imposing order through his own force of personality. He sent the severely wounded off in a truck to the Battalion HQ with a situation report and request for reinforcements. He got the rest of the men to police up the extra ammo off the dead, tip the slain creatures back into the bay, and set the Browning machine gun up in the second-floor window of an abandoned warehouse at the end of Pierce Street.

  Across the river, along the docks on the south side, Hennessey could see a couple of Brownings raking back and forth across the docks and shore. Then a tongue of liquid fire leapt out and showered the docks with jellied gasoline. As soon as Hennessey saw that, he knew that the fish-men would quickly figure to give the north docks another try.

  “There they are!” A stout Montana Sergeant named Dollins stabbed a trembling finger towards the bay. Bobbing on the surface about a hundred yards out, scores of squat heads listed atop powerful shoulders. Their fat eyes reflected the orange light from the fires on the docks.

  “Let ’em have it!” roared Cobb. With that, the Browning cut loose. The fusillade peppered the water, tore open misshapen skulls and sent the rest of the creatures diving under the waves. “Cease fire!” Cobb called up to the machine-gun nest. “Hold your fire!”

  Hennessey waited silently. None of the Marines spoke. No one breathed. The sounds of the little battles behind them in Innsmouth faded from their perception as they focused on the black waters of Innsmouth Bay. Every fiber of their beings reached out to try to pick out a sound, a movement, anything that would tell them where the attack would come. But nothing came, nothing moved but the waves lapping against the shore and the horrible bodies stacked along its edge. Hennessey waited in the snow with the rest of the Marines and listened to the waves breaking.

  Charl
ie Paskow broke the silence. “Tide’s comin’ in,” he whispered. Hennessey, lost in concentration, didn’t bother to answer him. “Tide’s not due till dawn,” he continued gravely. Hennessey was about to shush him when he caught Paskow’s eye. He was looking at the waves cresting against the shore. They were strong and insistent. And they didn’t wash back out. They just kept pushing one atop the other against the shore. The tide was coming in all right. In one single surge of water. Then Hennessey saw it. One of the fishing boats, nearly burned down to the waterline, rose as if a whale, pushing thousands of gallons of water before it, had just passed beneath. Before he could even register what he’d seen, Hennessey saw one of the dock’s still-standing pilings plow under, like a road sign struck by an out-of-control truck.

  “Under the water!” Lieutenant Cobb bellowed. “They’re under the water!” Marines surged forward to the edge of the sea wall to fire down into the submerged beasts. But it wasn’t a horde of sea devils.

  It was just one.

  Hennessey would later describe it to his Naval Intelligence de-briefers as being like an avalanche. An avalanche of tar that jumped up out of the sea.

  A fair description. Except it was far more than that. An avalanche may be animate, but it is lifeless. The thing that erupted from the sea was anything but lifeless. It veritably boiled with life, like a steaming, maggot-filled turd. There were the eyes, and the mouths, the teeth, the tongues, the tentacles, the pincers, the claws, the talons. It was the whole Bronx Zoo boiled down to a thick, viscous paste and then filled with lightning. Even the parts that looked like little more than fibrous snot moved and coiled with a terrible strength. Within a second, it rolled straight up the sea wall. Private Rhodes was standing right on the edge when it reared up like a wave cresting in reverse and then slapped its weight down on him. His helmet slammed down onto his bootlaces and most everything in between shot liquidly out the sides.